Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.

Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that...you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.

what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.