Happy new year! And now, some words of inspiration...

Albert Camus wrote, "One either serves the whole of man or one does not serve at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart," and so Camus called for "courage in one's life and talent in one's work." Wole Soyinka. This great Nigerian writer has in his writings and in the conduct of his life served the whole of humankind. He endured imprisonment in his dedication to the fight for bread and justice, and his works attain the pure beauty of imaginative power that fulfills that other hungry need, of the spirit. He has "courage in his life and talent in his work." In Soyinka's fearless searching of human values, which are the deep integument of even our most lyrical poetry, prose, and whatever modes of written-word-created expression we devise, he never takes the easy way, never shirks the lifetime commitment to write as well as he can. In every new work he zestfully masters the challenge that without writing as well as we can, without using the infinite and unique possibilities of the written word, we shall not deserve the great responsibility of our talent, the manifold sensibilities of the lives of our people which cannot be captured in flipped images and can't be heard in the hullabaloo of mobile-phone chatter. Bread, justice, and the bread of the heart - which is the beauty of literature, the written word - Wole Soyinka fulfills all these. -- Nadine Gordimer