“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 recordin...”

“...he is thinking about thoughts; so many thoughts piled up, such a quantity of half-remembered knowledge, so many emotions brought up from the well to spill out: the unrolling of history - a river...”

“It's as though a smile is ageless, or perhaps eternal, independent of the decay and collapse of the surrounding features.”

“Personally, I have detested Gordon Brown since the moment in 2001 when he tried to make cheap capital out of the Laura Spence affair; as his troubles have piled up, I have felt no sympathy for him ...”

“In a way, advertising, for all its shallowness, its love of design, its modishness and its self-justification, is curiously innocent. The idea of the hidden persuader or the manipulator is largely ...”

“A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.”

“I hate losing and cricket being my first love, once I enter the ground it's a different zone altogether and that hunger for winning is always there.”

“I think when you're winning, your uniforms are cool.”

“Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”

“nights and days came and passedand summer and winterand the sun and the windand the rain.and it was good to be a little islanda part of the worldand a world of its ownall surrounded by the bright b...”

“When you drop a glass or a plate to the ground it makes a loud crashing sound. When a window shatters a table leg breaks or when a picture falls off the wall it makes a noise. But as for your heart...”

“A good friend of mine once said, "I have never met a bigot who was a reader as a child.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”