As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.

I think Africa is slowly learning - and painfully - that importance of insisting on responsible leadership. It will come eventually, and we may be impatient and rightly so, because it is not coming fast enough. But that is the way to go.

There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.

Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.

Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.

Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.

I don't want to be the one to tell somebody, You will not make it, even though I know that the majority of those who come to me with their manuscripts are not really good enough.