Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.

I always say that if you're a novelist, the challenge is not writing what you think ought to happen, but trying in some way to write what did happen in a world that doesn't necessarily exist.

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.

Let's start a new tomorrow, today.

I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.

I was a stranger and you took me in. -Joji G. Shoji, d. 1921