“It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.”

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don’t just turn it off one day.

He is a fool who treats his brother worse than a stranger.

Nobody can teach me who I am.

A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness

Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can’t dance.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately. I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

If a child washed his hands, he could eat with kings.

The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.

As a rule I don’t like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.

In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn’t perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.

People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.

While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.

We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.

An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.

His masculinity was only too apparent

Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.

At all times, in every century, every age, there has been such a connection between despotism and religion that it is infinitely apparent and demonstrated a thousand times over, that in destroying one, the other must be undermined.

The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God.

Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

There is something very human in this apparent mirth and mockery of the squirrels. It seems to be a sort of ironical laughter, and implies self-conscious pride and exultation in the laughter.

Today, the number of migrants crossing is at a 30-year low. That’s because of years of bipartisan work on this issue.