You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig.

A pen on paper is the ideal way for me. I am not really very comfortable with machines; I never learned to type very well.

We live in a society that is in transition from oral to written. There are oral stories that are still there, not exactly in their full magnificence, but still strong in their differentness from written stories. Each mode has its ways and methods and rules. They can reinforce each other; this is the advantage my generation has - we can bring to the written story something of that energy of the story told by word of mouth.

My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.

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.