You don't ever want to say to a young person, You can't, or, You are no good. Some people might be able to do it, but I don't think I am a policeman for literature. So I tell them, Sweat it out, do your best.

In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.

When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.

If you're rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world's stories should be told - from many different perspectives.

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.

It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.