Unrequited affection is very painful for the lover, but it can have unexpected, creative consequences.

No emotion was supposed to cross the great divide of class. Affection could erase all hierarchy; in this was the danger, and the delight.

Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.

Almost overnight, white people have gone from being very powerful to potentially irrelevant. Their future in South Africa is not what many had envisaged, so it involves a lot of reinvention.

Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.

I think the impulse took shape in early childhood when I was very ill with lymphoma for a number of years. I spent a lot of time in hospitals and sick-rooms, being read to by various relatives, and I learned to associate books with love and attention.