Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.

It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take their eyes.

I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.

It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself.

Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades.

A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.

Here I am, where I am supposed to be.