I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.

there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

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 most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.