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.

I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.

African film makers are scraping by on a mere pittance.

We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.

When you are looking for corruption, you should look at the entire stratum of the society, while some forms of corruption are direct, others are indirect.

It is not fair to those who fight corruption that they have to fight the aggressiveness, the impunity of the corrupt.

Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.