Top 7 Quotes & Sayings by Marlene van Niekerk

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

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

Marriage is holy and it's private.

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

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

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

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.