Lauren Beukes Quotes

I have always thought that the rapid economic development of South Africa would in the long run prove to be incompatible with the government's racial policies, and recent events have tended to confirm my opinion.

When I first started out, I thought it was enough to make an angry song that pointed out the problems of the world.

While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.

Egypt, once a melting pot of peoples, classes, cultures and religions, has, after 30 years of Mubarak's rule, become a place of intolerance and distrust of the other.

In England, I've never really had a problem with racism.

I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation of social injustice.

It is property which has made tyrants and not tyrants property.

At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of Indian society. That's what I'm trying to do – it is not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination.

It was not until I got down to Latin America that I began to get a political education. Whatever my ideas when I went down there, I saw things around me every day that influenced me. I saw the terrible economic and social conditions, and the injustices that could not be ignored.

… modern civilization … enables us to cure sickness on a huge scale and to destroy each other on a huge scale. It enables us to liberate each other on a huge scale and to tyrannize each other on a huge scale…. There is no evidence of any continuous upward line of social progress

Our history is responsible for the differences in the South African way of life.

I often think that people who write a lot about poverty need to go and spend more time with poor people.

Apartheid didn't impinge on music. It impinged on people's freedoms.

I think racism is unacceptable and should not be stood for. It is not an issue just in Italy, it is around the world.

I don't want to talk about apartheid... I'm going to South Africa to play tennis and to see the country. That's as far as it goes.

Color does matter, even though people don't see it. I've lived it my whole life. It's just what I know.

There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.

What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.

All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the 'perfect' can live content and oblivious.

If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.

People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley].

In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, "You know, what you did was incredibly wrong."

The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.

Anyway, what is a country? When people say, "Tell me about India," I say, "Which India?.... The land of poetry and mad rebellion? The one that produces haunting music and exquisite textiles? The one that invented the caste system and celebrates the genocide of Muslims and Sikhs and the lynching of Dalits? The country of dollar billionaires? Or the one in which 800 million live on less than half-a-dollar a day? Which India?"

Racism does not diminish with brains, it's a disease, a sickness, it may incubate in ignorance but it doesn't necessarily disappear with the gaining of wisdom!