Marlene Van Niekerk quotes:

After all the years, after everything that you'd had to endure, after everything that you'd undertaken, however good or bad, long after you'd given up all hope, the reward.

Marriage is holy and it's private.

Nature is subtle and complex.

In a state of pseudo-death you restore your substance.

Everything is important. To the smallest insect, even the mouldering tree, the deepest stone in the drift.

First smile!! An unseasonal little shower of rain fell here, and a lot of butterflies drowned, so we put them in the sun and they came back to life, and flew up and then Agaat SMILED!

...a butterfly is like the soul of a person, it dries out in captivity.

..we all have to do things in this life that we don't like..

Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.

Nobody can be so beautiful from the outside and so hollow from inside. Not even in a third-rate novel.