Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
The facts are always less than what really happened.
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 foreve...
A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
... 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...
People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.
Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
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 w...
Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.
How did I find out? I was deceiving him.
I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.
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.
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
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 thoug...
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.
Communists are the last optimists.
I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.
