Quotes by Nigerian authors

"I've now been in this country for thirteen years, since I was seventeen. So this is my second home"

"I don't think Michael had to retire for us to get the spotlight, because when you win, it commands attention"

"I always keep a ball in the car. You never know"

"All these boundaries - Africa, Asia, Malaysia, America - are set by men. But you don't have to look at boundaries when you are looking at a man - at the character of a man. The question is: What do you stand for? Are you a follower, or are you a leader?"

"I remember at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Shaq always wanted me to show him steps over and over"

"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"

"When you get to that level, it's not a matter of talent anymore - because all the players are so talented - it's about preparation, about playing smart and making good decisions"

"When I look at the system here and look at my position - not just as a basketball player, but when I look around me at the values of the people and the culture and compare them with the values of where I came from - I feel so blessed to be from Africa"

"My background playing soccer gave me a natural advantage over many of the American-born players"

"Basketball is in my blood. It is my obligation to try"

"I don't think I'll ever escape the fact that I don't belong anywhere in particular. I've often dreamed about going back to Nigeria, but that's a very romantic notion. It's a hideous country to go to in reality"

"We're all outsiders in a way. We're all alone and can become very lonely"

"I generally find an affinity with a lot of the people I play and I suppose if I didn't feel an affinity for them then they wouldn't be particularly good performances"

"I guess I judge my films by how pleased I am with the work I do, so it's kind of on another level. If they do well at the box office, then that's great. Then I'm really pleased about that too"

"I think I'm much less self confident today. I actually went through a quite painful period because of that thinking that I was completely hopeless. But I think that's something that we all go through at various times of our lives and it was quite a sustained thing with me"

"It's kind of chased away a few demons for me and, um, it's educated me a little bit more"

"Initially I probably didn't even call it acting, but dressing up or something. As a kid I think you fully imagine the world in which you want to inhabit, so you put some clothes on and just kind of freely imagine this world, and it's a total imaginary world"

"Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger"

"I was going to be a scientist"

"The greatest religions convert the world through stories"

"The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things"

"I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends' floors, was happy, was miserable"

"You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones"

"The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell"

"The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering"

"The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure"

"Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide"

"The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing"

"Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret"

"We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings"