Africa Gives You The Knowledge That Man

For There Is Never Any Way To Go But In.

Always, In Epochs When The Languages And Dialects Of A Culture Have Become Outstripped By Development Of A Practical Sort, These Languages Become Repetitive, Formalised -- And Ridiculous. Phrases, Words, Associations Of Sentences Spin Themselves Out Automatically, But Have No Effect: They Have Lost Their Power, Their Energy.

I Think A Writer's Job Is To Provoke Questions. I Like To Think That If Someone's Read A Book Of Mine, They've Had - I Don't Know What - The Literary Equivalent Of A Shower. Something That Would Start Them Thinking In A Slightly Different Way Perhaps. That's What I Think Writers Are For. This Is What Our Function Is.

We Always Seem To Be Surprised By Events, Especially By Catastrophes, But Also By Wonderful Events. Look At 1990, The Year That The Soviet Union Collapsed And Apartheid In South Africa Collapsed And The Berlin Wall Came Down. I Don't Know Anyone Who Foresaw Those Events. It Seems To Me That As A Species We Are Constantly Trying To Adapt Ourselves To The Unexpected. In The Meantime, We Talk As If We Are In Control, And We're Not. This Seems To Me To Be The Truth About The Twentieth Century.

I Am Increasingly Afflicted By Vertigo Where Words Mean Nothing