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

Disaster is private, in its way, as love is.

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.

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

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.

I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.