"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."

"In every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together."

"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever."

"The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable."

"'Even the cat buries its dirt; I carry mine around with me.' She thought of saying it aloud many times in the weeks after she came home from the hospital."

"There was no mistaking her. She was a young woman whose cultivated gentleness of expression and shabby homespun style of dress, in the context in which she was encountered, suggested not transcendental meditation centre or environmental concern group or design studio, but a sign of identification with the humanity of those who had nothing and risked themselves."

"Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity."

"I think that as long as those of us in South Africa who are articulate are asked to go abroad, and we know we are going to be interviewed, we cannot refuse. There are so many people in South Africa, within the country, who are muzzled. And there are others who may not be muzzled within South Africa but whose passports are withdrawn, people like Bishop Desmond Tutu-a very important voice; you know, a writer is nothing compared with him. He is a big figure, a real leader, and he can't go abroad and speak. So I think that those of us who can, as long as we can, we have to use the opportunity."

"In countries like Czechoslovakia, like South Africa, like Argentina, guilt by association is a fact and therefore the friendships you form can be a political act. This circumstance, way of life, is very complex. People think that a political act is signing a declaration or planting a bomb, but there are all kinds of political acts in countries where there is a great political struggle going on."

"Novelists and short-story writers provide implicitly a critique of their society…A good writer can't help revealing the truth that is in his society and by that token there is a political implication and he is politically committed. (1983)"

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

"I think that the decision to be sincere is an artistic one."

"I like the idea of a literary patchwork, novel by novel, poem by poem, by different writers, mapping out an era, 'a continent' more and more thoroughly. No one writer can do it. (1979)"

"Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself — who wouldn’t make the world over if it were to be as easy as that."

"I opened the telegram and said, "He's dead —" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say."

"The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand."

"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."