I do not think that there is any time in our history when things were perfect. I do not expect such times in the near future either. But I think every generation has to examine what needs to be done, what belongs to its peace and proceed. And so what needs to be done will change with time depending on the conditions, whatever the conditions happen to be. And they will not be the same for generation after generation.

The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it's a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.

When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.

I think dialects should be left alone. People should write in whatever dialect they feel they want to write. In the fullness of time, these dialects will sort themselves out.

I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

Whenever I try to do anything on a typewriter, it's like having this machine between me and the words; what comes out is not quite what would come out if I were scribbling.

In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.