I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

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.

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.

I don't understand writers who feel they shouldn't have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary: one has to keep in touch with that... The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back.

I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

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