Quotes from Chris Abani

Sex is not always a choice lovingly made and enjoyed like plump well-handled self-chosen fruit teeth sinking into soft flesh in a dribble of pleasure. Nevertheless it abounds. Some because it is the truth of their being. Some to deny, negate, sate deep yearning, wordless, timeless.

I spend my life hustling for small money, staying one step ahead of de police. But I will not do dat all my life. You see, I done read Napoleon Hill and as a thinking man, and with de grace of God, I go be millionaire before I reach thirty.

To some I am a rabid vampire feeding on their humiliation.

My brothers must be as tired of this as I, dragging love as a tally board behind us, marking off an endless but complex math of ego and one-upmanship and debt. But the men who came before us didn't teach us another way.

And night, free at last, stirred, stretching, feral.

Death is a flock of blackbirds low over muddy streets in war-torn Sarajevo. Dirt-stained walls yearn for all that is night. Elegies fall like raw silk. If there is a way it is here. Salt and ash.

Death is always the expectation here and when my throat was cut it was no different.

Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is. We seldom play games--we aren't that sophisticated.

The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about.

We are hunting the demons that haunt others. We get a smell and off we go. And you know why, Sunil? You know why we are so good at hunting the demons of others? Because we are so good, gifted even, at stalking and evading our own. But all demons hunters think that they are really heroes, and you know what all heroes need?

Sometimes we say we want an end to hate or racism or sexism. But we all participate in keeping these structures alive. If everyone decided to relinquish the past what would happen to people who feel that there hasn't been proper atonement made to them? And what happens to the person who feels that the constant atonement is their identity?

If you want to know about Africa, read our literature -- and not just "Things Fall Apart," because that would be like saying, "I've read 'Gone with the Wind' and so I know everything about America."

I think it's an aggregation of all of the small acts that are really transformative. I think a group of small acts transform the individual. And maybe when the individual transforms, collectively we transform.

But the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people.

Elvis, stop dat! You know it is taboo to whistle at night. You will attract a spirit.

Nigerians are everywhere. There's an old joke, particularly about the Ibos, that when you finally land on Mars, you're going to find a Nigerian there who has a shop that is selling Coca-Cola--who took a speculative trip 20 years ago and has been waiting for everyone else to arrive.

We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not - I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value.