With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.

To get where you want to go you can't only do what you like.

Many have changed so much that they have lost the magic of the dream that carried them on their own bootstraps.

With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

Joseph and his mother come from the black kings who were before the white man.

A man can submit today in order to resist tomorrow. My submission had been such. And because I had not been free to show my real feeling, to voice my true thoughts, my submission had bred bitterness and anger. And there were nearly ten million others who had submitted with equal anger and bitterness.

All my life had been dominated by a sign, often invisible but no less real for that, which said: 'Reserved for Europeans Only.'

Being born white in South Africa or anywhere in the empire and Commonwealth automatically conferred this special status. You had no problem finding a place to live, a job, trade union membership, access to social services. Being white, speaking English, you were accepted as English, entitled to all the rights of citizenship.

For me, personally, life in South Africa had come to an end. I had been lucky in some of the whites I had met. Meeting them had made a straight 'all-blacks-are-good, all-whites-are-bad' attitude impossible. But I had reached a point where the gestures of even my friends among the whites were suspect, so I had to go or be forever lost.

I attended school regularly for three years. I learned to read and write. 'Lamb's Tales' from Shakespeare was my favourite reading matter. I stole, by finding, Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury.' These two books, and the 'Everyman' edition of John Keats, were my proudest and dearest possessions, my greatest wealth.

I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.

In East, South and Central Africa, the minority manipulated the majority into believing the minority was the majority, that there were more whites in the world than blacks; instilled in the blacks a sense of inferiority, inadequacy, worthlessness.

In the Caribbean islands, especially in Jamaica, have I found a country similar to South Africa plus the racial freedom I had sought so long.

Most of the black women who lived in the lower end of Vrededorp came from the countryside and were there to be near their menfolk who worked in the mines. They spoke neither English nor Afrikaans.

Must simplicity and humanity go under in the interest of progress? What is the most important component of civilization - is it human or mechanical? Must thought processes become involved and insincere? Must the class-struggle warp those who are involved in it?

My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.

My mother went to work in the homes of white folk, usually living in and looking after their children. The money was small.

Perhaps life had a meaning that transcended race and colour. If it had, I could not find it in South Africa.

Positive social awareness among the South African educated half-caste is zero. Teaching is a mechanical job. The best way of earning a living.

The London I entered was a great bustling metropolitan city at war, an imperial power fighting to hold on to that empire. And the teeming colonial subjects of that empire did not, on the whole, want England to lose that war, but they also did not want the empire to emerge unchanged from it. This, for very many of us, was the hard dilemma.

The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings.

The only places where I have found that simple human dignity, that respect for the other man, and the gracious feel of tolerance and humanity have not been either among the heroes of the class-struggle or the 'thinking men' but among my simple 'backward' people.

The racism of the Nazis threatened to make whatever we had experienced look like child's play. If they could be so brutal to the Jews, what would they do to the blacks? So large numbers of black young men and women rallied to the defence of the empire.

There is a qualitative difference between being a minority and being a majority. Majorities are stronger under psychological pressure because numbers count. But only if they are aware of it.

Tribal man is not an individual in the western sense. Psychologically and emotionally, he is the present living personification of a number of forces, among the most important of which are the ancestral dead.

We do not ask the right questions when we are young, so we miss the important answers. Now it is too late to ask, too late for the illuminating answers, and the unanswered questions haunt us for a lifetime.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.

I was drawn to boxing because I got beat up as a kid. I was the kid with the piano books in a New York neighbourhood.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

The proper study of mankind is books.

I have written about 10 books, all just practical encouragement for moms.

Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn't feature.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist.

As I have studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon, I have come to know through the power of the Spirit of God, that these books contain the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.

Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Well, it was actually - I brought the idea of doing a documentary to HBO back in 2000, when there were some press reports sort of were bandied about that there were going to TV movies based on some of the books that were out.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

I get letters from readers who say that they have always hated reading, but somebody suggested one of my books, they actually finished the book and enjoyed it, and they're going on to read another book. I'm thrilled that they have figured out that reading is fun.

I never buy magazines, I never even buy books.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.