Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

Africa has no future.

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

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.