“And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.”

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.

There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?

How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?

After money in the bank, a grudge is the next best thing.

Democracy is talking itself to death. The people do not know what they want; they do not know what is the best for them.

Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. … One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him.

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

The best luck of all is the luck you make for yourself.

My hair is not really white; it’s kind of grayish, and I don’t like the color. So I make it totally white with Klorane dry shampoo. That is the best thing to do because my hair is always clean.