Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret. |
Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret. |
Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you've got left is your belief in the imagination. |
I don't think I can make people understand what my writing is about. That really belongs to time and the individual. |
I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends' floors, was happy, was miserable. |
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. |
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare. No, let's say Shakespeare and Dickens, to get them in the right order. |
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. Do y |
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide. |
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide. |
Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love. |
Our time here is magic! It's the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It's the only space. |
Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible. |
Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it. |
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger. |