Just think of the work you've set yourself to do, and do it as well as you can.

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.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

A man to whom you do a favor will not understand if you say nothing, make no noise, just walk away. You may cause more trouble by refusing a bribe than by accepting it.

I have found that I work best when I am at home in Nigeria. But one learns to work in other places.

I do not actually see how art, literature can be anything other that being in that domain of trying to tell us, trying to get us to see what is important in our lives.

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