“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.”

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.

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.

Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do.

Creativity is the art of the impossible

If we are true, if we can love, if we have vision, if we can have courage, we can, we should, we ought to, we will.

Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.

To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.

An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.

Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

I like people and I like hearing their stories. The way that they deliver them is always very particular and I think that their accents are integral to that.

You see, Hansel and Gretel don’t just show up at the end of this story. They show up. And then they get their heads cut off. Just thought you’d like to know.

I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

Of course on air I use occasional hyperbole to tell a story.

Your life should be a story you are excited to tell.

It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.

I’m the only Mauritanian filmmaker so it wouldn’t make sense to make a film in France. I could shoot outside of my own country if the story was something that called for it.