“I’d known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn’t be possible, since it’s illegal for them to speak with foreigners.”

There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you’ll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.

But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.

The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.

Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything

What good’s a captive without her captor?

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer’s sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.

[I]n communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

All the human actions we think of as essential to a character – had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea.

Writing is hard work, and if anything’s true about the process, it’s that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper.

Conjure up all the strength you have and drive through whatever it is keeping you on your knees. Build up the strength and your knees may never buckle again!

I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.

Life brings what it brings. I might be young but I’ve learnt this: prepare for each blind corner with your strongest shoulder dropped, ready to smash through whatever is thrown at you next.

Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

“A name isn’t a person.” Ga said. “Don’t ever remember someone by their name.

Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.

Tanzania being among the highly indebted countries, I had to give sports the least prominence during my first term, while setting priorities in revitalising our economy.

Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers.

I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we’d never smelled the fumes of petroleum.

I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.

We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.

It is decidedly not true that “nice guys finish last,” as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.

We’re highly social animals – I’m told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

A highly learned man has two sources of happiness: either he abandons all earthly interests, or else he possesses much which could be abandoned.