“Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.”

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.

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train.

I’m not running, I’m not planning on running, and I’ve got nothing new on that story.

When any calamity is suffered, the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

The moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable…that what we take for granted may not be here for our children

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

And what is so intricate, so entangling as death? Who ever got out of a winding sheet?

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.