“Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.”

“Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.”

“I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.”

“But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.”

“The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic.”

“The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!”

“A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.”

“The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.”

“Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.”

“People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.”

“In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.”