After all, if you make your enemy look like a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.

Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.

By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.