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"My opinion is that under the gaze of history he felt there was no
way in which he could separate himself off from the Afrikaners while
retaining his self-respect, even if that meant being associated with all
that the Afrikaners were responsible for, politically."

" To me, on the other hand – pardon me for saying
this, but he is dead, so I cannot hurt his feelings – to me he is nothing.
He is nothing, was nothing, just an irritation, an embarrassment. He
was nothing and his words were nothing. I can see you are cross
because I make him look like a fool. Nevertheless, to me he really was
a fool."

'He is a weak man,' I said. 'A weak man is worse than a bad man. A
weak man does not know where to stop. A weak man is helpless before
his impulses, he follows wherever they lead.'

"Without the truth, no
matter how hard, there can be no healing"

"Here we have a man who, in the
most intimate of human relations, cannot connect, or can connect only
briefly, intermittently. Yet how does he make his living? He makes his
living writing reports, expert reports, on intimate human experience.
Because that is what novels are about – isn't it? – intimate experience.
Novels as opposed to poetry or painting. Doesn't that strike you as
odd?"

"White South Africans in those days liked to think of themselves as the Jews of Africa, or at least the Israelis of Africa: cunning, unscrupulous, resilient, running close to the ground, hated and envied by the tribes they ruled over. All false. All nonsense. Those people were not tough, they were not even cunning, or cunning enough. And they were certainly not Jews. "