“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.”

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

Maybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.

We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.

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.

Ingenuity requires creativity.

To me, creatively challenging myself is my version of owning the Nets.

What is the worst is a fashion designer who talks all the time of his or her creativity, what they are, how they evolved. Just do it and shut up.

Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.

I don’t think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.