Every Successful Artist Comes From A Family

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.

Much Of The Image Of The Amazingness Of America Comes From The Movies Into Other Cultures. And It's Much The Same Thing When You Reverse It. Much Of Africa Is Presented Through Poverty, Through Drought And War. [but] You're Not Presenting People, You're Not Presenting Countries, You're Not Presenting Complexity, And So People Can't Care About An Amorphous Mass Called Africa.

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?

The Greatest Thing About Form And Convention Is That It Saves You From Having To Reinvent The Wheel. Now, Whether You Mount The Wheel To A Horse Carriage Or A Formula One Racing Car, Make It Plain Or Give It Spinning Rims, Those Are All Craft Decisions. But The Fact Of The Wheel Remains: It Will Turn If You Set It Down. That's What I Mean About The Beauty Of The Gifts Genre Can Offer.

My Mom Taught Me To Read When I Was Two Or Three. When I Was Five I Read And Wrote Well Enough To Do My Nine-year Older Brother's Homework In Exchange For Chocolate Or Cigarettes. By The Time I Was 10, I Was Reading Orwell, Tolstoy's War And Peace, And The Koran. I Was Reading Comic Books Too.