The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.

I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.