“This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.”

I know that human beings are capable of anything.

You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.

I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.

I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.

Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.

People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.

Don’t despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft

When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.

If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.

One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’

When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.

The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

Push yourself. Don’t settle. Wear those stripy legs with pride. And if you insist on settling down with some ridiculous bloke, make sure some of this is squirreled away somewhere.

Not thinking about anything is zen. Once you know this, walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is zen. To know that the mind is empty is to see the buddha…. Using the mind to reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness. Freeing oneself from words is liberation.

Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity.

Chase him down and stall for time. I need two more minutes. Chase him down? How? The neon has a flat. With your own two feet! You mean exercise?

I’m definitely a hair down girl. I’m a fan of the natural, earthy look.

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.

I cannot hold with those who wish to put down the insignificant chatter of the world.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.