There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.
Writing is a lonely job.
Because my head is full of stories and I love to tell them.
You’re not really alone when you are writing and anyway there has always been a sense of someone else.
I’m afraid I really haven’t got much left to say. I have such a limited repertoire.
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible.
Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works.
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
That is the mystery about writing, it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times when the heart is cut open.
It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, of drinking, or looking on, or sex.
My characters tell me so much and no more with reference to their experience, their aspirations, their motives, their history.
People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.
I would be so lonely on earth if I didn’t have the possibility and freedom to write. I will go to my grave changing a word. And there is always the absolutely right word.
Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice.
Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.
I came out of the womb afraid. I was afraid of failing. So instead of creating a book I was creating excuses.
Even when I finish a book, I’m never sure whether it is good or rubbish.
You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
I liked to watch the fights. Somehow it reminded me of writing. You needed the same thing, talent, guts and condition.
It’s assumed that in order to be a serious writer, you have to look like the back of a bus.
Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.
Every writer thinks he’s a good one.
What concerns me most is shape and structure.
Whether a novel is autobiographical or not does not matter. What is important is the truth in it and the way that truth is expressed.