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

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.

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.

There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…

a dream can be the highest point of a life

I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.

Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.

The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.

What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings?

We are not mad. We are human. We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.

I love you, with a touch of tragedy and quite madly.

It is our own evil thoughts which madden us.

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male’s arrogance made it a discussion.

I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.