“It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.”

If I hold her hand she says, ‘Don’t touch!’ If I hold her foot she says ‘Don’t touch!’ But when I hold her waist-beads she pretends not to know.

People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

I think not just Nigeria but I think the whole of Africa has to turn back to the rural areas and that’s where the majority of the citizens are and that’s where the engine of of development has to be found.

Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am – and what I need – is something I have to find out myself.

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.

When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.

Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.

In dealing with a man who thinks you are a fool, it is good sometimes to remind him that you know what he knows but have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace.

When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.

I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own. If you don’t like what somebody says, say what it is you don’t like.

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.

Charity is the opium of the privileged.

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.

And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

Whatever befalls us has its meaning; though it is often hard to grasp. In the Book of Life every page has two sides. On the upper one, we inscribe our plans, dreams and hopes; the reverse is filled by providence, whose verdicts rarely match our desire.

You are enough. Your life has meaning. Your emptiness are valid. You matter.

Do you know that the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? Nothing that has meaning is easy,”Easy” doesn’t enter into grown-up life.

Without the existence of the opposite, the concept has no meaning.

I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

My first language, the true language of the soul spoken only on our planet of origin, had no word for betrayal or traitor. Or even loyalty- because without the opposite, the concept had no meaning.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.