“If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.”

Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.

We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.

Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.

Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.

To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.

Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.

I was given some Harry Potter books by a young friend. I wanted to know why young people liked it so much. And I noted that there were some values in Harry Potter that are common to many books that are popular all over the world. In the end,

Before things are written down they don’t exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

The star [Tycho’s supernova] was at first like Venus and Jupiter, giving pleasing effects; but as it then became like Mars, there will next come a period of wars, seditions, captivity and death of princes, and destruction of cities, together with dryness and fiery meteors in the air, pestilence, and venomous snakes.

If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.

Toyin Falola has given us what is truly rare in modern African writing: a seriously funny, racy, irreverent package of memories, and full of the most wonderful pieces of poetry and ordinary information.

She had been so wicked that in all her life she had done only one good deed-given an onion to a beggar. So she went to hell. As she lay in torment she saw the onion, lowered down from heaven by an angel. She caught hold of it. He began to pull her up.

Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.

In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away.