Booker Prize Winners

"It was Sinclair's The Jungle that really started me thinking about politics: I thought, good God, these people who are exploited in a meat-packing factory-they're just like blacks here. And the whole idea that people came to America, not knowing the language, having to struggle in sweat shops. . . I didn't relate this to my own father, because my father was bourgeois by then... but I related it to the blacks. Again, what a paradox that South Africa was the blacks' own country, but they were recruited just as if they had been migrant workers for the mines. So I saw the analogy. And that was the beginning of my thinking about my position vis-à-vis blacks. But though I didn't know anything-I was twelve or thirteen, and leading the odd kind of life I did, living in books-I began to think about these things before, perhaps, I was ready for them. When I got to university, it was through mixing with other people who were writing or painting that I got to know black people as equals. In a general and inclusive, non-racial way, I met people who lived in the world of ideas, in the world that interested me passionately. In the town where I lived, there was no mental food of this kind at all. I’m often amazed to think how they live, those people, and what an oppressed life it must be, because human beings must live in the world of ideas. This dimension in the human psyche is very important. It was there, but they didn’t know how to express it."

"after my first trip out, I realized that “home” was certainly and exclusively—Africa. It could never be anywhere else."

"It'll be enough to take your mind off your stomach. - When lovers cannot touch, they tease each other instead."

"But there's no indemnity. You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results."

"When the body is no longer an attraction, an expression of desire, to bare your breasts and belly is simple; you lay like dogs or cats grateful for the sun."

"Our liberation cannot be divorced from black consciousness because we cannot be conscious of ourselves and at the same time remain slaves -"

"The main reason why we're still where we are is blacks haven't united as blacks because we're told all the time to do it is to be racist."

"The blackman is not fighting for equality with whites. Blackness is the blackman refusing to believe the whiteman's way of life is best for blacks."

"Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next."

"The will is my own. The emotion's my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there's no 'we', only 'I'."

"Communists are the last optimists."

"Conrad went off some evenings for Spanish lessons and sometimes came back with the girl who taught him."

"Strong emotion - faith? - has different ways of being manifested among the different disciples within which people order their behaviour."

"For nearly thirty years the Communist Party allied itself as a legal organization with the African struggle for black rights and the extension of the franchise to the black majority."

"Flora pretended to cuddle me against the cold, but I didn't need her kind of emotional excitation. She talked about 'the girls' in there, and my mother was one of them."

"There are always sources of desolation that aren't taken into account because no one knows what they will be."

"Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a schoolgirl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt and, by the loop at its neck, a red hot-water bottle. (First lines)"

"When Johannesburg people speak of ‘tension,’ they don’t mean hurrying people in crowded streets, the struggle for money, or the general competitive character of city life. They mean the guns under the white men’s pillows and the burglar bars on the white men’s windows. They mean those strange moments on city pavements when a [B]lack man won’t stand aside for a white man.”"

"And for a moment I accept the triumph as I had managed it.”"

"The farm hasn’t managed that for us, of course, but it has done other things, unexpected, illogical.”"

"Out in the country, even ten miles out, life is better than that."

"I should have given it up long ago if it had not been for her."

"Between its vandyke teeth, in the mouth opened in a roar too terrible to be heard, it had a black tongue."

"Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station."

"The train came out of the red horizon and bore down towards them over the single straight track."

"The young man outside. But he is not part of the unreality; he is for good now. Odd…somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places. The heat of shame mounted through her legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring. Pouring, pouring. She sat there, sick. A weariness, a tastelessness, the discovery of a void made her hands slacken their grip, atrophy emptily, as if the hour was not worth their grasp. She was feeling like this again. She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself.She sat there not wanting to move or speak, or to look at anything even; so that the mood should be associated with nothing, no object, word, or sight that might recur and so recall the feeling again….Smuts blew in grittily, settled on her hands. Her back remained at exactly the same angle, turned against the young man sitting with his hands drooping between his sprawled legs, and the lion, fallen on its side in the corner.The train had cast the station like a skin. It called out to the sky, I’m coming, I’m coming; and again, there was no answer."

"No one can say what it was the white soldier said over the telephone to his commanding officer, and if the commanding officer had told him what was going to be done, or whether the white soldier knew, as a matter of procedure laid down in his military training for this kind of war, what would be done. The police found the bicycle beneath his dangling shoes. So the family hanger-on still rides it; it would have been lost if it had been safe in the kitchen when the raid came. No one knows where the chief found a rope, in the ruins of the village."

"It's only on warm summer nights that the lions are restless. What they're seeing when they gaze during the day is nothing, their eyes are open but they don't see us -you can tell that when the lens of the pupil suddenlys shutters at the close swoop0 of one of the popcorn-begging pigeons through the bars of the cage. ... It's only on certain nights that their muscles flex and they begin to pant,their flanks heave as if they had been running through the dark night while other creatures shrank from their path, their jaws hang tense and wet as saliva flows as if in response to a scent of prey, at last they heave up their too-big heads, heavy, heavy heads, and out it comes. Out over the suburbs. A dreadful straining of the bowels to deliver itself; a groan that hangs above the houses in a low-lying cloud of smog and anguish."

"The zoo lions do no utter during the day. They yawn; wait for their ready-slaughtered kill to be tossed at them; keep their unused claws sheathed in huge harmless pads on which top-heavy, untidy heads rest,... gazing through lid-slats with what zoo visitors think of in sentimental prurience as yearning.Or once we were near the Baltic and the leviathan hooted from the night fog at sea. But would I dare to open my mouth now? Could I trust my breath to be sweet, these stale nights?"

"Wait for it; it will fall so quiet, hardly more than a faint roughness snagging the air in the ear's chambers. ... And begins once more. The panting reaches up up up down down down to that awe-ful groan!"

"Just before light, when it's supposed to be darkest, the body's at its lowest ebb and in the hospital on the hill old people die the night opens, a Black hole between stars, and from it comes a deep panting. Very distant and at once very close, right in the year, for the sound of breath is always intimate.It grows and gorws, a rising groan lifs out of the curved bars of the cage and hangs above the whole city -- And then it drops back, sinks away, becomes panting again."

"Anyone who lives within a mile of the zoo hears lions on summer nights. A tourist could be fooled. Africa already; at last, even though he went to bed in yet another metropole."

"Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life."

"Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it."

"There can be no global culture while there are inhabitants deprived of the ability to read, to have access to the powers of the imagination released through the written word, through literature; deprived of the intellectual and spiritual bounty of libraries."

"No globalisation without a human face."

"Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition."

"The question mark remains. It hangs over peace negotiations - that vital base for the answer an outsider who believes in justice surely must support: two fully independent states on agreed, realistic frontiers."

"There are two kinds of leaders in the species humankind. There is the man or woman of personal ambition, and there is the man or woman who creates a self out of response to people's needs, the call of conscience against oppression, injustice, and sufferings of any nature within our human condition. To the one, the drive comes narrowly from within; to the other it is a charge of energy which comes in others needs and the demands these make on all of us who share humanity. Conscience is a form of solidarity."

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

"Dangers are relative, over time and distance; fear is relative, whether it menaces a multitude or a single life, but it always demands the same answers: a yes, or a no. Capitulate within oneself, or refuse to submit to attrition, fear that eats the soul."

"Fear. It's unacknowledged; shared by friend and foe if nothing else is."

"time is on a plane of existence great writers sometimes penetrate"

"Can there be the phenomenon of a world state of mind?"

"Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks."

"Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society."

"I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that."

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

"What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates."

"Everyone wears the uniform of how he sees himself or how he disguises himself."