It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

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

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

Africans need to be kicked, that's the only thing they understand.

I will say I am the sum of my books.