For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

Despair ... is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.

I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

The spark of true poetry flashes when ideas are juxtaposed that no one has yet thought of bringing together.

he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.