“When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.”

Women and music should not be dated.

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don’t just turn it off one day.

He is a fool who treats his brother worse than a stranger.

Nobody can teach me who I am.

A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness

Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can’t dance.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately. I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

If a child washed his hands, he could eat with kings.

The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.

As a rule I don’t like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.

In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn’t perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.

People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.

While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.

We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.

You can not stop criminals and mad men with laws, you can only stop violence with the fear of armed victims.

A sweaty Macbeth with blood on his arms coming in fresh from the battle doesn’t interest me.

I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.

I once recommended [in a San Francisco Chronicle column] that a third arm – a plastic arm – be sewn at the base of the spine so that people could have a tripod to sit on while waiting in line, and it was taken seriously.

She doesn’t give you time for questions as she locks up your arms in hers. And you follow till your sense of direction completely disappears.

Somebody will come up to me after a show and have me sign their arm, and the next time I see them my autograph has been permanently inscribed on their arm.

There’s a lot of different ways that a song would be a challenge to parody.

That he armed the Mujahideen, that he armed Saddam, that he armed Iran, that he armed two-thirds of the Axis of Evil, and that he funded terrorists in Central America. He was, in my mind, a terrible president.