I’ve tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I’ll try to tailor-make it.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

You can sometimes play some really good football and not score.

As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

Everybody that’s successful lays a blueprint out.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

It is a fine game to play – the game of politics – and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

My view is there’s no bad time to innovate.

All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

‚Recreative‘ is a word that I invented because in urban culture, with colloquialism, we invent so many slangs. I don’t like the way that ‚recreational‘ sounds – I don’t like to say I do a lot of ‚recreational‘ reading. I like to say that I read ‚recreatively.‘ I do a lot of ‚recreative‘ reading.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

The proper method for inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

I just have a relationship with my imagination. It’s like my friend, almost.

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

When I started analysing games in 2001, I had a DVD recorder. I’d be at home watching the games just on a normal TV, watching what I could and trying to figure out what we would be facing a few weeks later. The problem was, in the team meetings, I’d always have to keep going back and forwards with the footage, trying to get to the right part.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

I think that’s why I put my energy into making music. That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.

In war there is no substitute for victory.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

It is often useful, if an enemy happens to see you, to pretend that you have not seen him. Or it may sometimes be useful to pretend that you have other men with you. I did this once in the Boer War when, having crept up a donga to look at a Boer fort, I was seen by the enemy, and they came out to capture me.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

A lot of people think international relations is like a game of chess. But it’s not a game of chess, where people sit quietly, thinking out their strategy, taking their time between moves. It’s more like a game of billiards, with a bunch of balls clustered together.

I like to be creative.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.