The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

The creative act is not pure.

They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space--atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time.

I don't cry. Unfortunately, I seem rather short of tears, so my sorrows have to stay inside me.

You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.

To discover the exact location of a 'thing' is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?

Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it?

Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it’s as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away.

I'm an atheist. I wouldn't even call myself an agnostic. I am an atheist.

I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.

Communists are the last optimists.

But a human being, she, she, cannot simply exist; she is a hurricane, every thought bending and crossing its coherence inside her, nothing will let her be, not for a moment. Every emotion, every thought, is invaded by another.

You don’t have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there’s a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.

... what it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold.

How did I find out? I was deceiving him.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

The truth isn't always beauty but the hunger for it is.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.