There is no story that is not true.

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.

There are people who say that if you are told that your house has fallen you don't ask what about the ceiling or what about the windows. The main thing is that this house, Africa, has fallen. Literature is just one aspect, pick any aspect of the situation.

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.

I grew up recognizing that there was nobody to give me any advice and that you do your best and if it's not good enough, someday you will come to terms with that.

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

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.