I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.

Poetry and slave trading cannot be bedfellows. That's where I stand.

There is nothing to fear from someone who shouts.

When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.

...Nothing puzzles God

The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.