I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.