Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.

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.

There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy... But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason... A love, inspired, it seems, by the gods, which it is impossible to fight, distort, destroy, or weaken. In fact, the attempts to destroy such loves only strengthen them. And to do nothing allows them to continue to grow at their natural pace, inexoribly, till this love becomes a wide and silent adoration.

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.