123 quotes
Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light — and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau — into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
Writing and Being (1991)
She would have drowned herself long ago if she had not met me. She doesn’t do that because, perhaps, I am more dreadful.
The House Gun (1998)
She reminds me of pig. Our ancestors didn't eat pig.
My Son's Story (1990)
It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being.
Writing and Being (1991)
“[T]he isotopy of fragmentation constitutes a unifying web structurally present at the level of story, text, and narration”
My Son's Story (1990)
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.
Burger's Daughter (1979)
Being here: in a particular time and place. That is the existential position with particular implications for literature.
Writing and Being (1991)
Literary scholars end up being some kind of storyteller, too.
Writing and Being (1991)
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 Eats the Soul (2003)
We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone.
Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)
The will is my own. The emotion's my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there's no 'we', only 'I'.
Burger's Daughter (1979)
He [the victim] was my friend, I always took him hunting with me
The Moment Before the Gun Went Off (1988)
Our liberation cannot be divorced from black consciousness because we cannot be conscious of ourselves and at the same time remain slaves -
Burger's Daughter (1979)
Oh dear, I’m sorry, Bra[brother] and Duncan remembers that “it was exactly the manner, the words, with which the man had announced the end of the months they had lived as lovers."
The House Gun (1998)
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)
That kind of act isn’t in the range of emotional control in which their son’s character was formed, or the contemporary ethic that men don’t own women. Therefore the act could not have been committed.
The House Gun (1998)
Bad enough to have killed a man,” he believes they will say to themselves, “without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies, as well
The Moment Before the Gun Went Off (1988)
The forces of being remain. They are what the writer, as distinct from the contemporary popular mythmaker, still engage today, as myth in its ancient form attempted to do.
Writing and Being (1991)
There is a paradox. In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state's indictment of treason, and the liberation forces' complaint of lack of blind commitment.
Writing and Being (1991)
The train came out of the red horizon and bore down towards them over the single straight track.
The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952)