An African writer who really wants to interpret the African scene has to write in three dimensions at once. There is the private life, the social life, and what you may call the supernatural.

I have never thought of my life as divided between poetry and politics.

It is Sunday, mid-morning-Sunday in the living room, Sunday in the kitchen, Sunday in the woodshed, Sunday down the road in the village: I hear the bells, calling me to share God's grace.

A writer should have another lifetime to see whether he is appreciated.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

The history of catastrophe requires such a literature to hold a broken mirror up to broken nature.

I write nothing in this life because I do not want to spend today remembering whatever good I did yesterday.

The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.

Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.

Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.