There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.

Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.

We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one's life without a sense of time is to squander it.

Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people.

Touch a university with hostile hands and the blood you draw is prompt, copious, and real.

Surely going to bed with a man before marriage was the most courageous act of my life.

I regard the whole of my life as having been lived in an anxious world.

Writers are what they write, also what they fail to write.

Long-married couples balance their checkbooks as a substitute for love-making, or they refuse each other love by protesting one another's financial error or excess.

I learned early in life that to laugh before breakfast was to cry before dinner.

Where there are children, people become neighbors; they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another.

Lovely high ceilings, ' I said. 'If you were very tall, you'd feel quite comfortable in here.

The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. I love Africa, which is my mother and my father. When I am dead, I shall miss the smell of Africa

My weakness, that is, my quadriplegia, is my greatest asset because it forces me into the arms of Christ every single morning when I get up.

In Ireland, I don't get asked out much. English boys are a lot more flirty.

It started when I woke up, all I wanted to do is jump out of the window. I didn't want to eat anymore, because I was afraid that I might poison myself somehow.

I always hold doors open, I always try to be nice.

Jemu watched his father disappear. He didn't throw the coconut and he didn't cry. Never again would he know love for another human being that wasn't adulterated by another, contradictory emotion.

Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.

If I had to pick between Heaven and Hell, I'd pick Hell, because I can't keep white clean.

I blend memories. I blend them into one that's funny. I exaggerate to clarify.