“I look at my yesterdays for months past, and find them as good a lot of yesterdays as anybody might want. I sit there in the firelight and see them all.”

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city.

It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy.

I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains – the drab and dowdy digger in the earth.

Success feeds confidence.

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend.

You can live a lifetime and at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.

In Africa people learn to serve each other. They live on credit balances of little favors that they give and may, one day, ask to have returned.

A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.

I have a trunk containing continents.

At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.

Success breeds confidence.

Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.

A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.

Memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will.

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe.

A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.

When you go out with your crew of friends and you get into trouble, at the end of the night when you come home, you’re still the same crew of friends. It’s just the story that you have to tell.

All of my friends were doing babysitting jobs.

People want to be friends with someone who likes to have a good time.

I don’t like those men who claim that their wife is their best friend. . . . I think spouses should tolerate each other and occasionally have sex.

A lot of us are friends with each. We obviously respect each other.

Sex is important to guys. We need stories to tell our friends.

Being in a relationship is like being in A.A. My friends ask me, ‘How’s it going with that girl?’ ‘One day at a time, man.’

He is your friend who pushes you nearer to God.