“I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.”

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.

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.

Nature won’t be summoned to order and won’t be kept waiting. It must be caught, well caught.

You must go into the dark in order to bring forth your light.

Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

In order to grow, you must accept new responsibilities, no matter how uncertain you may feel or how unprepared you are to deal with them.

Don’t be concerned that things appear to be falling apart: this has to happen in order for something new and wonderful to emerge.

In order to access a warrior’s courage, we must explore why we are so committed to our story and what we are afraid will happen if we give it up.

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests.

The world order needs a major overhaul.