“He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.”

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it’s more scary to draw. It’s more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing.

There is no person without a world.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.

We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.

When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should ‘teach writing,’ which I have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in.

Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you’ve made something, it’ll – the world will be different.

We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth– we call it life.

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don’t gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

Under the seams runs the pain.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don’t always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.

They’re thinking of turning the peasant into an educated man. Why, first of all they should make him a good and prosperous farmer and then he’ll learn all that is necessary for him to know.

How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed:.

We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war. A new era is upon us.

And even in terms of justice, law codes, the legal system. A person who does not know English in Africa is excluded from that system because he can only operate through acts of translation.

I know of only three people who really understand money. A professor at another university. One of my students. And a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England.