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" You see, 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. "

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" 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 periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man. "

" I learned that life will go through changes - up and down and up again. It's what life does. "

" I was going to be a scientist. "

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" We never think that our mothers will die. It was like suddenly an abyss opened at my feet - I was standing on nothing. It was the strangest thing. Her passing away ripped the solidity out of the world. "

" I believe in leavening. You can't have words sticking out too much, like promontories. They disturb the density. You have to flatten them, or raise the surrounding terrain. "

" 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. "

" Home can be the friend you have been searching for all your life or the person you met once very briefly. "

" When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self. "

" 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. "

" Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities. "

" You cannot come to a Nigerian restaurant without having pepper soup. "

" 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. "

" 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 lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends' floors, was happy, was miserable. "

" The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell. "

" I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare. "

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" We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings. "

" 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. "

" The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing. "

" Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide. "

" 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 impartiality to human failure. "

" 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. "