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

Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

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.

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.

I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.