“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.”

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.

The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.

What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings?

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.