Generally, writers have very uninteresting lives.

I'm not designed to interact with society.

What happens in a room lingers there invisibly, all deeds, all words, always. Not seen, not heard, except by some, and even then imperfectly. In this very room both birth and death have taken place. Long ago, maybe, but the blood is still visible on certain days, when time wears thin.

Something in him has changed, he can’t seem to connect properly with the world. He feels this not as a failure of the world but as a massive failing in himself, he would like to change it but doesn’t know how. In his clearest moments he thinks that he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.

The only defence against raw, naked feeling was reason. Understanding made sadness easier to bear.

There’s no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear blue sky one morning and take away everything you’ve built, everything you’ve counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you.

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.

If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn’t do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.

For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise.

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.