SUNDAY, 5 FEBRUARY 2017
If I had been happy in Stellenbosch in 1994 and ’95, happy in Korea in 1996 but especially ’97 and ’98, happy in Johannesburg in 1998, and happy in Taiwan in my first few years – and with happiness I mean more money, initially, and later also regular female companionship, I wouldn’t have produced as much text as I ended up producing.
To write had for a long time been a mechanism for me to cope with loneliness, stress and boredom. It was only since 2003 that I seriously started thinking of myself as a writer who may have something to say. I had spoken and written about my ambition to write before 2003, but I think if I had experienced more sensory happiness in the middle to late nineties and the early years of the new decade, my ambitions to write would have faded.
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