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

People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them. This is what people have come to expect. Its not viewed as a serious continent. Its a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people dont do what common sense demands.

Generally, I don't attempt to produce a certain number of words a day. The discipline is to work whether you are producing a lot or not, because the day you produce a lot is not necessarily the day you do your best work. So it's trying to do it as regularly as you can without making it - without imposing too rigid a timetable on your self. That would be my ideal.

The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!

When we hear a house has fallen do we ask if the ceiling fell with it?

I teach literature. That's easy for me. Take someone else's work and talk about it.

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