But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.

As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

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

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

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.