If you were to loose the habit of making the effort to get the book and read the words one by one you would have lost something terribly important. So I think that we have a task to ensure that this doesn't happen.

What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.

Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.

...when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.

There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.

I think Africa is slowly learning - and painfully - that importance of insisting on responsible leadership. It will come eventually, and we may be impatient and rightly so, because it is not coming fast enough. But that is the way to go.