When I was growing up in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, I sold doughnuts, popcorn and Kool Aid every day after school so that my family had some money and I could pay my school fees. It was a tough life.

Of course I would have liked to have played at the World Cup, but I achieved so much in my career as a footballer that I can't have any complaints.

The United Nations should come in and take over Liberia, not temporarily, but for life. To make Liberians believe in democracy, to make us believe in human rights, they need to go in and just seize control of the country. That is the only way Liberia will ever become the kind of country it was supposed to be.

In America there is a public library in every community. How many public libraries are there in Africa? Every day there are new books coming out and new ideas being discussed. But these new books and ideas don't reach Africa and we are being left behind.

We get the papers: I prefer broadsheets because I had the fear of God put into me by the tabloids and, though I'm very much over it, I still don't really like to read them. It's a destructive vernacular that makes me angry and scared, and it is all sensationalist onomatopoeia and alliteration.

My journalistic mission was straightforward: to await the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Nobody knew quite when this would be. But the diplomacy - the meetings in the U.N. security council, the allegations about weapons of mass destruction, the martial language of Tony Blair and George W. Bush - all suggested a war was brewing.

God drove Cain out of his presence and sent him into exile far away from his native land, so that he passed from a life of human kindness to one which was more akin to the rude existence of a wild beast.

I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.