“The writer is the visionary of his people… He anticipates, he warns.”

The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.

Mythology can be used, and has been used, even to re-state, you know, the very urgent problems of the world.

A human feast is an indifferent morsel to a god.

When I say war, I’m not talking about mental war; I’m talking about totally eliminating the obstacles to transformation of our children.

There’s a lot of insincerity about the actions of our legislators; they create distractions – like this anti-gay law you alluded to – and try to mobilise, to exacerbate people’s emotions. Until the legislators started making laws, people minded, generally, their own business.

I don’t know any other way to live but to wake up everyday armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me.

I can look violence in the face and either reject or accept it.

Romance is the sweetening of the soul With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.

We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.

Intolerance has always been with us, you know. The moment you have ideology, we have intolerance, whether it’s the secular ideology or, you know ideocratic ideology, which always brings with it some kind of intolerance.

My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience.

Governance can dig itself into a huge hole and not even know it’s in there.

I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.

Well, some people say I’m pessimistic because I recognize the eternal cycle of evil. All I say is, look at the history of mankind right up to this moment and what do you find?

I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we’d never smelled the fumes of petroleum.

You accept whoever you are interacting with, directly, or indirectly.

The only source from which an entrepreneurs profits stem is his ability to anticipate better than other people the future demand of the consumers.

Hence, I must recommend to you prompt exactness, submissiveness, and total self-abnegation that you be enabled to heed naught but our desires; let them be your laws, fly to do their bidding, anticipate them, cause them to be born.

Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it’s not necessarily some kind of ‘Be Here Now’ feel-good thing because it doesn’t always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It’s primary.

What we anticipate seldom occurs: but what we least expect generally happens.

The notion of getting pleasure from food has gone too far; we can also get pleasure from anticipating a meal, and from not being quite sated.

And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

When the Constitution was written, the founders had no way of anticipating the new technologies that would evolve in the coming centuries.