The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.

Maybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.

Don't read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.

I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.

Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.

A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.