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

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

Anybody who wants to rule a group will find that if this group is quarreling among themselves they leave you alone.

The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it's a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.

Some people flinch when you talk about art in the context of the needs of society thinking you are introducing something far too common for a discussion of art. Why should art have a purpose and a use? Art shouldn't be concerned with purpose and reason and need, they say. These are improper. But from the very beginning, it seems to me, stories have indeed been meant to be enjoyed, to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound.

I prefer to go on trying all kinds of things, not to be told, This is the way it is done.

A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the harmattan for drying them?