Every child has the capacity to be everything.

Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.

Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages - being at the center of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting.

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

When there's a war, people get married.

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.

Intelligence forbids tears.