“We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.”

Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest.

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation… Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.

There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

Maybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.

We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

Literature doesn’t have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.

People that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.

I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.

Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

I mean, the greatest athletes in the world are African-American.

In this league, experience means a lot.

The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.

What I saw in that country, I saw in that country and I saw people respect him and his family and that’s what I mean about that.