Zoë Wicomb

Quotes

• “The newspapers were always full of stories about abandoned children found tied up or living under the bed because their families were ashamed of them on account of the colour of their skin.”
• “On the other hand, when I was at school, I remember kids in my class boasting about the members of their family who had 'turned white'.”
• “I was hot-headed, impatient, I just wanted to leave the whole oppressiveness of my own culture far behind.”
• “I have a ghost existence here: my whole intellectual and emotional life is in South Africa.”
• “I'm very, very contrary. And I want to be in control, which is what informs my attitude to publishing, editing, being interviewed. I set high standards too: as a reader, I don't read any poor novels, so I'm always aware of how much my own work falls flat by comparison. And perhaps it's because I grew up in South Africa, and it was easy there for people like me to grow up with a consciousness of inferiority.”
• “After several false starts, self-reflexivity offered a solution –– I decided to exploit my inability to write, to fictionalise the writer herself, and to make the actual writing of Pringle’s history the framework of the novel.”

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