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Quotes by Author
"For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian."
76
"Without Hitler, the State of Israel probably would not exist today. To that extent he was probably the Jews' greatest friend."
76
"The day we decide to drop the flimsy makeshift scenarios in our cluttered mind and eschew the 'alleluias' of self-importance, life can become genuine, lucid and graceful, like a flow of wellness in the glow of a new morning. ['Words flew away like birds']"
75
"In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?"
74
"Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left."
72
"I, personally, have found reading a continual support to writing."
70
"You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city."
70
"To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance."
70
"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity."
70
"Everyone can be a leader irrespective of their age, race, creed, nationality or political affiliation. Once you can figure out your talents and optimize them very well, at the right place and at the right time, you are a leader."
69
"I once knew a house rather like The Land of Smiles - an old house occupied by a varied collection of young people, mainly students. However none of these people were true models for the characters in the book, though their way of life may have been."
68
"It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar."
68
"Take the attitude of a student, never be too big to ask questions, never know too much to learn something new."
68
"I'm a writer first and a woman after."
67
"If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it."
67
"More than this, even in those white men who professed religion we found much inconsistency of conduct. They spoke much of spiritual things, while seeking only the material."
67
"Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business...because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people."
67
"If at first you don't succeed, tweak it before you toss it."
67
"The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator."
66
"The conclusion you can draw from these characteristics is that you have an uneven development of class activity and an uneven development of class consciousness in the working class."
66
"The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love."
Love,
66
"I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred."
66
"In high altitude astronomical facilities we routinely discharged large amounts of nitrogen gas into closed spaces. We were never informed by the astronomy management team about the abnormally low oxygen environments that the use of liquid nitrogen creates, how long term exposure to it manifests itself in human health and the resulting abnormal mental behaviors."
66
"Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks."
65
"Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level."
64
"Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil."
64
"It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow."
64
"In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love."
64
"You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act-that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?"
64
"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us."
64
"We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise."
63
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