If you're rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world's stories should be told - from many different perspectives.

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.

Nigeria is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.

The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.

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.

When a new saying gets to the land of empty men, they lose their heads over it.

There are people who say that if you are told that your house has fallen you don't ask what about the ceiling or what about the windows. The main thing is that this house, Africa, has fallen. Literature is just one aspect, pick any aspect of the situation.