History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

When you've got African parents, you go to uni, do finance, and go into accounting. But I'm not good with systems. I dropped out in my final year of college to become a Christian poet. Then went back to do my A-levels and went to uni in Birmingham to do political science and theology. I lasted 12 weeks.

Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.

I'd love to go back to Europe in the '20s and '30s, for the beginning of the Psychoanalytic Movement, and Freud and Jung, and all that was going on with discoveries in quantum physics. The whole nature of reality was changing and being challenged.