There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

In the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect.

It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.

When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.

To be a person is to have a story to tell.

Where a pack of monkeys had traveled over the road, the smell of them lingered for a long time in the air, a dry and stale, mousy smell.