When people ask me whether I am a spy –‘are you now, or have you ever been?’ –I am tempted to reply with a hearty –‘Yes, and since the age of five.’ For a state of watchfulness must surely be the first requisite of a writer, as it is of a secret agent. A writer, like a spy, must prey upon his neighbours; like a spy he is dependent on those whom he deceives; like a spy he must somehow contrive to keep a distance from his own feelings and by doing so conjure up a package that will meet with the approval of his masters. Like a spy, he is not merely an outsider, but implicitly a subversive..

A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warm the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.

When she came to write her story, she would wonder when the books and the words started to mean not just something, but everything.

To write was a need; I had to write down messages, to tell apartheid's horrors.

She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.

It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.

Most writing happens when one is alone, you really have to assume yourself into your stories, and you need to feel true empathy with others in order to be able to write convincingly.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.

Our story is not really ours until we tell it, until it belongs to others too.

writing has changed me. And there is the powerful need we all have to tell a story, each of us with a piece of the whole pattern to complete. As Alice Walker says, We are all telling part of the same story, and as Sharon Olds has said, Every writer is a cell on the body politic of America.