All Quotes

"I have no plans to investigate Tati Company land ownership and dealings in land. However, when all land ownership and transactions are captured in an electronic system it should be easier for anybody to access information at the Deeds Registry as maybe needed."

"I read mostly fiction, both contemporary and classic. I do love non-fiction too, if I lay hands on any. I enjoy world literature as well. I’m partial to women writers and their works, especially African women writers."

"Join me to enjoy this blog where you will find good reviews and comments on novels, short stories and poetry."

"I also read English and Theaters Arts at the University and majored in Playwriting. I have a Masters in International Affairs, all from the University of Ghana, Legon. I am a Senior Assistant Registrar, with the Institute of Professional Studies. I am married with three boys."

"I love to write and read and not necessarily in that order. My home is choked with books of all sizes, both adult literature and children stuff as well."

"I also have a passion for thrillers, mystery and any good suspense novel from the West. I have read almost all of Sydney Sheldon, Dan Brown, Robert Ludlum, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham, Martina Cole and a few of David Baldacci. I do love historical novels and romance. So, it goes without saying that I have read Danielle Steel, Judith Gould and Judith Krantz."

"I am also fascinated with any novel that is based on the Jews and the Holocaust. So, I’ve read almost all of Leon Uris."

"What else can I say? Did I forget to mention that I write romantic fiction for serialisation in a few newspapers in the country? Though, that is on hold at the moment. I’ve also done some radio serial drama for the Ghanaian public on topics ranging from child health and female sexual reproductive health. (A John Hopkins/USAID/Ghana Health Service project)"

"Oh yes! I love discussing current affairs with friends, as well as blogging on the books I read. So this is me, a woman of diverse reading taste and talents."

"Drugs will never build you with anything; you will make a lot of mistakes."

"We have also learnt that our people have got a lot to say. That ordinary South Africans possess profound knowledge and ideas about their communities, from local government issues to social justice issues to issues that have to be done"

"The Afrika Mayibuye Movement will not be a cult. It will not be a family project. It will not be a scheme for self-enrichment,"

"“I heard someone explain once why people buy books. They said when people buy a book, they are not just buying that book, they are also visualising that they are buying the time to read it. So when you hold that thing in your hand you are not only anticipating the story between the covers, you are picturing the kind of life that allows space for you to lie about and read. Those unread volumes on your shelves represent a glorious future moment when you will spend time with them"

"I had thought, as many parents do, that ‘one day I am going to sit down and talk to you about this, but right now, we need to get you to dance class, then I have to go to a show or we have to go to school,"

"And then it turns into, ‘Another day I will talk to you about tattoos or pay equity – I’m sure that day will come.’ But then she was gone."

"It resonated with them as they were or had been on the same journey,” You have this idea of what parent-hood is going to look like. Then it comes along and you haven’t even been able to finish a sandwich without someone taking a bite out of it. Being a parent is busy."

"It was kind of strange, really, seeing it all unfold,, who lives in Auckland with husband comedian Jeremy Elwood. “These were a lot of issues that I talk about in my book, the gender pay gap being one of them. And now we’re finally saying, ‘Actually, we know what fair is and this isn’t it."

"I always love having Holly in the audience because I’ve always done stand-up about her. My first stand-up set in 1993 was about giving birth and breastfeeding."

"I don’t know if you’ve met anyone to whom nothing bad has happened. They are the most tedious people in the world."

"I’d like to be a primary school teacher one day, but right now, I am happy being a mum"

"I have to thank a writer friend called Kerry Donovan Brown. I was trying to create this world from top principles, based on what worked for the story. They helped me with this idea of going back. There’s a point in evolution where we went from one-celled amoeba that kind of just floated around doing our own thing to growing a mouth and becoming predatory. What Kerry helped me do was go right back to that moment and imagine a world where a species never became predatory. I needed to find all these solutions to invasion, to eating. I needed to find solutions that weren’t hunting or soldiering or defending physically."

"I did a workshop with Jordy Rosenberg maybe five years ago, and he was talking about this idea that a work of fiction can have a thesis statement, just like an essay, but it isn’t necessarily interested in answering that thesis statement. That helped me heaps. I write to try to understand things that confuse me. The form emerges as I try to answer questions. The shape of a book also comes from problem solving and constraint. You make one decision and that cuts off twenty decisions and you’re stuck with two decisions, that kind of thing. And life too. The body that I’m in and the life that I’ve lived lead me to write this particular book in this particular way. That’s why it’s so important to live around the writing. I need to be in political action, I need to be in family action. These things lead to structure. And sometimes it comes really late. With Audition, it was drafts and drafts and drafts."

"My first book came out fifteen years ago, and it was a very different world. In those days, I felt I had to be cool and calm and detached. (And when I say cool, I mean in temperament, not in, eh, Fonzie.) I read mainly detached, kind of cool writers. The opposite of who I am. You can probably tell, I talk too much, I’m angry, I’m messy as far as emotions go. But I was trying to be that calm person when I wrote. I still feel that pressure now. But the thing is that, while I spend my time writing, no one’s waiting for it. It takes a lot of sacrifice from my family. I need a lot of support from my friends. So I want it to count. Not that purely escapist work isn’t important because I think it is, but there are issues I’m interested in. We have a terrible government here in New Zealand at the moment, lots of unemployment, high levels of unhoused people, incredible poverty. And they keep telling us not to get upset. There’s pressure from all directions to be “reasonable.” At events where people might’ve spoken out, everyone’s being a little bit calmer. It worries me a lot."

"I live in Aotearoa/New Zealand as Pākehā, Tangata Tiriti, which means I’m part of the colonizing group. A massive part of living here is working out how to be the best guest, and how to be aware of the harm that I do just by being here. In Audition, tied into questions about the carceral system are questions of land back. We’re pretty much all living on stolen land in New Zealand and that makes a major difference to me as a writer. If I write, how much space do I take up or how little space should I take up? But the amazing thing about living in New Zealand is that if I can widen my understanding to Te Ao Māori, the indigenous world of this country, this is a place where land is a relative of the people. Rivers are citizens. There is a way of thinking about relationships outside of the transactional, imagining work as relational. A writer’s relationship to the land that they’re on is huge. The places that we walk make up a kind of psychic map in our heads. It’s absolutely inseparable from the work."

"Work is the most interesting thing to me. I’m the first person in my family to go to university, and work was always the way you showed your worth. My dad, until recently, asked why I don’t go back to hairdressing. It’s the best job I’ve ever had. It was a way to be with people, to hear conversation, to see things. This is what I love about work: we’re suddenly put in relation to people that we wouldn’t seek out. We have these personas that we put on. It’s such a rich space. I feel a bit self-conscious that I’ve cycled through so many jobs, but it’s the nature of being an artist and working. It’s difficult to find a job you can put everything into and still have time and energy for writing. There always comes a point in the day job where they’re saying, don’t you want to do more? and I’m like, No, not really. When I first started working, which is a hell of a long time ago, there wasn’t this thing about passion. You didn’t have to be enthusiastic about doing your job, you were just there to do it. And that’s why I love the trades; I feel a sense of accomplishment. You do a haircut and there’s a haircut."

"I'm really happy with her because she applies the same principle that I used to apply during my career: give everything, do your best."

"This is the goal, to be able to have African people interested in the sport, interested in sustainability, in racing, in discovering new cultures"

"I try to be like a sponge and take the best out of them, as a leader trying to reproduce it, but in my own way."

"One of my friends, the writer Laurence Fearnley, got me in the habit of writing 500 words a day, which works for a first draft. I’ve also done things like book myself cheap motel room down the road so I have 24 hours to write. Another friend, the writer and photographer Anna Sanderson, says everything is art, and I really like that. Whether I’m washing the dishes or yelling at a protest—it all feeds the work. There are different ways of composing. When my son was young, I would put on a character and go for a walk with him and be like, Oh, what would the character think of that tree? But I don’t want to make out like balancing work and writing is easy. It’s the hardest thing. And as work becomes more precarious and funding becomes less, we’ll end up with this weird class thing where the only people who can write are the people who can afford to write."

"My writing is always autobiographical. I live in a body that I don’t understand. I have a lot of trouble moving through the world for all sorts of reasons that are inside my skin and inside my brain. But I’m not a life writer. I can’t write essays; I’m not good at them. I also spent a lot of years in the wilderness of alcoholism and drug addiction and hurt a lot of people. Part of my amends is to not hurt them further by glorifying my life, saying, “Yeah, I was a tough, hard bitch, and I did this.” So I really want to write the imagined, but I can’t do that without having some link to lived experience. Damien Wilkins, one of my teachers, once asked someone, “What do you have to do to a real experience to make it fiction?” I hope I never find an answer, but I’m reaching for it every day. Audition got started because I got stuck in a cupboa."

"There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public. There are worse things than these miniature betrayals, committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things than not being able to sleep for thinking about them. It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse"

"It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse."

"But now that I am in love with a place which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,happy is how I look."

"I stopped writing poetry when I stopped smoking.... It was more complicated than that."

"I write in praise of the solitary act: of not feeling a trespassing tongue forced into one's mouth, one's breath smothered, nipples crushed against the ribcage, and that metallic tingling in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve: unpleasure."

"Somehow we manage it: to like our friends, to tolerate not only their little ways but their huge neuroses, their monumental oddness: "Oh well," we smile, "it's one of his funny days.""

"My verse forms are relatively traditional (traditions alter). In general they have moved away from strict classical patterns in the direction of greater freedom — as is usual with most artists learning a trade. It takes courage, however, to leave all props behind, to cast oneself, like Matisse, upon pure space. I still await that confidence."

"Perhaps relationships work more powerfully when there is absence and tension and a lot of heartache. I can't live with people."

"Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen."

"All poets, all writers, are terrible parasites. We use people and experiences."

"Unfortunately, things didn’t go well as we planned in this tournament. We really fought hard to reach the goal but we couldn’t, but it's also part of the game."

"We didn’t start the tournament so well. But we held on and stayed faithful. We achieved what we wanted."

"The journey was not easy, but God being so good, we achieved our target."

"My aim is to play for Chelsea Ladies. I want to win the Women's Champions League with Chelsea Ladies."

"Women Football in Ghana don't pay."

"My mum was against my profession from the early stages, she said I won't give birth when I continue playing."

"My dad wa in support of what I was doing when I started from my early stages."

"The women's game is changing and football is growing so everyboy is putting in everything to get there."

"The guy is winning trophies, he’s making the right decisions. And listen, in the season, you’re going to lose a lot of games"

"You’re going to win a lot. The goal is to learn from those defeats and reduce the amounts of defeats and increase the amount of wins."