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" I'm an Afro-realist. I take what comes, and I do my best to affect what is unacceptable in society. "

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" You always assume for some strange reason that you need three meals a day. "

" Looking at faces of people, one gets the feeling there's a lot of work to be done. "

" One has a responsibility to clean up one's space and make it livable as far as one's own resources go. That includes not only material resources, but psychological resources: the commitment of time and a portion of your mind to something when you'd rather be doing something else. "

" Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centered squarely on the ownership of land. "

" History teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accompany their righteous thirst for justice. "

" I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident. "

" You cannot live a normal existence if you haven't taken care of a problem that affects your life and affects the lives of others, values that you hold which in fact define your very existence. "

" After the death of the sadistic dictator Gen. Sanni Abacha in 1998, Nigeria underwent a one-year transitional military administration headed by Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, who uncharacteristically bowed out precisely on the promised date for military disengagement. Did the military truly disengage, however? No. "

" The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail. "

" Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped. "

" Human life has meaning only to that degree and as long as it is lived in the service of humanity. "

" All religions accept that there is something called 'criminality.' And criminality cannot be excused by religious fervour. "

" Well, the first thing is that truth and power for me form an antithesis, an antagonism, which will hardly ever be resolved. I can define in fact, can simplify the history of human society, the evolution of human society, as a contest between power and freedom. "

" I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood. "

" The scales of reckoning with mortality are never evenly weighted, alas, and thus it is on the shoulders of the living that the burden of justice must continue to rest. "

" In Africa, those who have money - businessmen and banks - do not believe in film. "

" I'm not sure I'm trying to communicate a message. I'm just trying to be part of the movement away from the unacceptable present. "

" Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent. "

" Just like birds, hunters know no borders. "

" Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress the truth. "

" There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter? "

" But when you're deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it's amazing. "

" The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices. "

" The Lagos of my childhood was a well-laid-out maritime city. "

" One has to confront history honestly. "

" You go to conferences, and your fellow African intellectuals - and even heads of state - they all say: 'Nigeria is a big disappointment. It is the shame of the African continent.' "

" I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself. "

" I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we'd never smelled the fumes of petroleum. "

" I don't have the sort of temperament that submits to Christianity or Islam. "

" One's own self-worth is tied to the worth of the community to which one belongs, which is intimately connected to humanity in general. What happens in Darfur becomes an assault on my own community, and on me as an individual. That's what the human family is all about. "