“My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience.”

Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.

I have no money to give to you but I have ideas and organizational capacity.

For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.

If man cannot, what god dare claim perfection?

Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.

I am a very curious person; I’ll always ask: is this thing true, is it not true? And I use my own means to investigate and come to my conclusion.

I have one abiding religion-human liberty.

We do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.

Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.

I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don’t function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I’m even ready to write.

It’s the place to begin, always — to return to home, literally.

I said: “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces”. In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: “I am a tiger”. When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.

Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.

But when you’re deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it’s amazing.

My definition of slavery is the deprivation of human volition, any form of relationship between two peoples which is based on the deprivation of volition of one side.

The media owes the responsibility to constantly tell the public the truth.

I always wanted to be a performer, I didn’t know exactly what kind of performer, all I knew was there were certain things that I liked. I liked movies a whole lot, and I loved music.

It’s true that I am not from the south and I have a certain reserve. I take time to get close to, and I don’t immediately throw my arms round someone. But it is more a question of style.

We have to stop this idea that we have to be a certain shape.

I feel nothing, apart from a certain difficulty in continuing to exist.

[Sherlock Holmes] has moved from being someone who was sociopathic, work-obsessed and slightly amoral, into being someone who has a certain degree of a private life, which is very, very private, with The Woman, or Irene Adler.

At a certain point I decided to keep on because I felt like the work was getting better, and I was taking great pleasure in that.

Love is next to Godliness with certain safeguards.

Happiness is above all things the calm, glad certainty of innocence.