When I tried to create a new political party, which I stressed that this is not my party. I believe very much that there has to be a revolution and this is a party for the young.

A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.

I think the epicentre of terrorism whether you call it cesspit or whatever you want to call it, shift, if you asked me a while ago, I would have said Somalia, Somalia has quietened a bit - and I think the epicentre right now is in Northern Nigeria.

I don’t know any other way to live but to wake up everyday armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me.

One, a mass movement from within, which, as you know, is constantly being put down brutally but which, again, regroups and moves forward as is happening right now as we are speaking.

Of course I've enjoyed having the Nobel Prize, the prestige that goes along with it, the money that came with it in particular. I was the typical, still am to some extent, impecunious writer, just struggling to make ends meet, so that, nobody's going to deny that at all. In fact, if they want to give it to me a second time, I'm standing by, ready to receive it, but it's a problem, it's a real problem and then expectations and then you have monsters like Sani Abacha who come up from time to time and who would have died a happy man if he'd succeeded in hanging a Nobel Laureate for literature.

The gods in Yoruba mythology are not remote at all. They're benign, they're malign, they are mischievous, like Eshu for instance, tricksters, rascally, fornicators, that's a similarity to Greek mythology, for instance, you know. They're not saints, they're not saints. They're powerful. It's why they're not tyrannical. Of course, a number of them are also very, you know, benevolent, you know, there are saintly virtues to be found in them.