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Quotes by Novelist
"Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought."
178
"The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next."
169
"Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings."
169
"Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries."
168
"In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner."
167
"In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility."
167
"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."
Life,
167
"If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?"
166
"Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another."
Life,
164
"What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude."
164
"A nobler example, because a less personal one, of the pinch of poverty, is when it prevents the accomplishment of some cherished scheme for the benefit of the human race."
163
"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."
163
"The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know."
162
"I think all writing is done through memory."
162
"Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens."
162
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
162
"The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up."
161
"That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do."
161
"Somehow, the painting soothed him. It verified his fears. But it also informed him that fear was wonderful."
160
"The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing."
160
"The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good."
160
"But everything of value about me is in my books."
157
"Winning Nobel imposed on me a lifestyle to which I am not used and which I would not have preferred."
156
"The sky is one whole, the water another; and between those two infinities the soul of man is in loneliness."
155
"What breaks capitalism, all that will ever break capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart."
155
"This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true."
154
"The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness."
153
"No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking."
151
"The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I'd done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn't read it."
151
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