Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

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.