Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes.

The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of reeducation and regeneration that must be done. In fact, he should march right in front.

Mosquito [...] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. "How much longer do you think you will live?" she asked. "You are already a skeleton." Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.

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

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.