“Artists are the architects of our future. The messages they deliver through music, film and television are what guides popular culture. If we want to see more love, peace and prosperity in the world, artists must take responsibility and lead.”

“If you are seeing anybody as better than you, it’s only because they are less deceived than you”

“Love one another. Love yourself. Then love will find you whole not half.”

“Wisdom must yield to superstition’s rules,Who arms with bigot zeal the hand of fools.”

“The instability and disorderliness we have in Nigeria today and Africa at large is totally due to the absence of this light.”

“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it… None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

“I can’t give a Professor love!”

“I went to the library. I looked at the magazines, at the pictures in them. One day I went to the bookshelves, and pulled out a book. It was Winesburg, Ohio.. I sat at a long mahogany table and began to read. All at once my world turned over. The sky fell in. The book held me. The tears came. My heart beat fast. I read until my eyes burned. I took the book home. I read another Anderson. I read and I read, and I was heartsick and lonely and in love with a book, many books, until it came naturally, and I sat there with a pencil and a long tablet, and tried to write, until I felt I could not go on because the words would not come as they did in Anderson, they only came like drops of blood from my heart.”

“I am, and always will be, the optimist. The hoper of far-flung hopes, and the dreamer of improbable dreams.”

“Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.”

“In the days after my heart attack & before I began to write again, all I could think about was dying. I’d been spared again, and only after the danger had passed did I allow my thoughts to unravel to their inevitable end. I imagined all the ways I could go. Blood clot to the brain. Infarction. Thrombosis. Pneumonia. Grand mal obstruction to the vena cava. I saw myself foaming at the mouth, writhing on the floor. I’d wake up in the night, gripping my throat. And yet. No matter how often I imagined the possible failure of my organs, I found the consequence inconceivable. That it could happen to me. I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.”

“If you are alive, don’t ever lose hope.”

“Belief isn’t supposed to make sense, at least not all the time. In that, it finds its power. It gets to creep up on you and carry you forward. Until you can carry yourself again.”

“Your level of neuroses will only find love in a made-for-TV movie.”