62 quotes found
Writer · Nigerian · 1959
Nigerian writer (born 1959)
“The worst time was 1983. Love and life and everything went wrong. I reached absolute rock bottom. I saw the Minotaur at the bottom of the abyss. I learnt of the harshness of the world and its impar...”
“When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in.”
“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 d...”
“I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.”
“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, i...”
“One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial ...”
“The intelligence that shaped the universe, shaped you. There is an inner part of us, for ever obscured, for ever mysterious, which is most alive during the process of composition. And that inner pa...”
“Do you know what the luckiest thing is?’‘No.’‘It is to be at home everywhere.”
“Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.”
“When we’ve been travelling around I’ve often thought: Oh, this would be a good place to be, and that would be an excellent place to live. And yet, after I’ve seen everything I’ve decided that home,...”
“I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you.”
“He thought about how the camera makes one fall in love with an image of oneself, and perpetuates a false reality.”
“The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.”
“In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, we ...”
“Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encoun...”
“The highest kind of writing—which must not be confused withthe most ambitious kind…belongs to the realm of grace. Talent ispart of it, certainly; a thorough understanding of the secret laws,absolut...”
“I noticed that in a corner, across from where they ate with such innocent relish, sitting forlorn and abandoned, was the ghost of their son. He had lost both of his arms, one side of his face was s...”
“Strange things are happening to us.’‘To our children.’‘They sayhe is looking for the spirit of Independence.’‘They say he is looking for himself.’‘For his ownspirit.’‘Which he lost when the white m...”
“Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.”
“In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.”
