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

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

At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously....

Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can’t.

I don’t think that, when future generations look at the apartheid struggle, they will see it as quite the momentous literary cauldron that recent history has suggested. In fact, as well as recording the struggle...