Bessie Head Quotes (1937-1986)

“there's this complete disparity between a publisher's estimate of his public and the reading public in America which actually is very responsive to questions of human suffering. I have been baffled because a publisher says you have to be very careful about the American public and yet the American public seems to be the most responsive and sympathetic in the world.”

“I asked Bessie Head why a writer of such renown as she chose to remain in an isolated village, with no telephone, few modern conveniences, remote from the culture of cities. She told me Serowe suited her literary themes. She came from a humble background, she said, and preferred ordinary people. Powerful people, she went on, tended to be domineering; they don't pay their bills. The village people, she said, pay their bills "meticulously." "I have the courtesies, and love, of the people," she said. "What other life can I live?"”

“Bessie Head: I found her novels very, very gripping, fascinating, challenging, really intellectually intriguing.”

““I once sat down on a bench at Cape Town railway station where the notice "Whites Only" was obscured. A few moments later a white man approached and shouted: 'Get off!' It never occurred to him that he was achieving the opposite of his dreams of superiority and had become a living object of contempt, that human beings, when they are human, dare not conduct themselves in such ways.” https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/15900.Bessie_Head”