What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.

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.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.

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

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.