“When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.”

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.

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.

I’d love to go into WWE and have a real knock and see what’s what.

Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress.

It doesn’t matter how you get knocked down in life, because that’s going to happen. All that matters is that you gotta get up.

Marriage hasn’t been my thing. But gay people, knock yourselves out!

I touch it and it rings! One day the wind may blow it off the shelf, or my elbow may knock it from the table.

The knock-out punch is always the one you never see coming.

And the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare fists and sit on him until he yelled for help.

I don’t try to knock people out, but I have the ability to press him and get the cheese.