“I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.”

I know that human beings are capable of anything.

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.

All these names we’re using now are just an illusion made to keep us fighting each other.

There are (or is) indeed no contradiction between science and religion, the fields of which are different, and which, far from mutually fighting and persecute, must, on the contrary, complete each other.

Don’t get caught up on ‘I’m brown, black, white, red, blue, whatever.’ You gotta ask, what were you called before 1492?

I’m young. I’m 22. I’m still growing. I just feel like it’s time for me to go up.

I’m very flexible. I’ve got flexibility in any weight class.

Poetry is an extra hand. It can caress or tickle. It can clench and fight.

We’ll fight Pacquiao, I’ll stop this fight [Carlos Molina] to fight Pacquiao. What would I got to do?

Both of them can get it. They can line up.