Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate that the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself.

One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.

A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.

Those who are talking sharia in Nigeria are really just politicians exploiting what they think is available. But if it should turn out that there are in fact whole sections of the country which believe that it is legitimate to chop off peoples hands because they stole a hen - if that should really turn out to be the genuine belief of responsible, educated people in the North than I would say there is no chance. But I do not believe that is the case. The sharia was always there but it was never force onto non-Muslims and it was not ever applied in the area of criminal law.

Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig.

I think not just Nigeria but I think the whole of Africa has to turn back to the rural areas and that's where the majority of the citizens are and that's where the engine of of development has to be found.

Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write.