The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
I know that human beings are capable of anything.
People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
I was going to be a scientist.
Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
Literature doesn’t have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.
This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
If we are true, if we can love, if we have vision, if we can have courage, we can, we should, we ought to, we will...
Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.