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

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self

Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.

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.

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

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.