People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.
To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.
I am from there. I am from here. I am not there and I am not here. I have two names, which meet and part, and I have two languages. I forget which of them I dream in.
Nothing is harder on the soul, than the smell of dreams, while they're evaporating.
And you became like coffee, in the deliciousness, and the bitterness, and the addiction.
A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare.
If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.
Being from Africa is the best thing that could have ever, ever happened to me. I cannot see it any other way. All of my fundamental principles that were instilled in me in my home, from my childhood, are still with me.
Conscience, man's moral medicine chest.
On the stage. . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or for the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is a general tendency for things to be brought to the level of farce even when the theme is serious enough.
I have a lot of funny friends, though not everyone's funny all the time. Doon Mackichan's my funniest friend in the pub; Nina Conti's the funniest with a monkey.