Every lizard lies on its belly, so we cannot tell which has a belly-ache

It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

There is a certain increase in the importance I assign to women in getting us out of the mess that we are in, which is a reflection of the role of women in my traditional culture - that they do not interfere in politics until men really make such a mess that the society is unable to go backward or forward. Then women will move in.

When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.

If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect.

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.