Chinua Achebe
Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am - and what I need - is something I have to find out myself.Collection: Who I Am
There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.Collection: Lions
A man to whom you do a favor will not understand if you say nothing, make no noise, just walk away. You may cause more trouble by refusing a bribe than by accepting it.Collection: Men
We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n'ani ji onwe ya: 'He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.'Collection: Thought Provoking
Become familiar with your home, but know also about your neighbors. The young man who never went anywhere thinks his mother is the greatest cook.Collection: Mother
It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live.Collection: Men
A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.Collection: Men
If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.Collection: Understanding
When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.Collection: Men
The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.Collection: Brother
Those whose kernels were cracked by benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble.Collection: Humble
The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.Collection: Responsibility
Do not be in a hurry to rush into the pleasures of the world like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come.Collection: World
Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.Collection: Dance
When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.Collection: Fighting
I believe in the complexity of the human story, and that there's no way you can tell that story in one way and say, 'this is it.' Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing ... this is the way I think the world's stories should be told: from many different perspectives.Collection: Believe
If you don't like someone's story, write your own.Collection: Writing
A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatnessCollection: Greatness
When brothers fight to death a stranger inherit their father’s estateCollection: Brother
When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.Collection: Writing
There must be areas in which a particular character does not represent you.Collection: Character
Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?Collection: Blame
We know the potentiality of Nigeria and the talent and the resources and to see it having no effect on the lives of the people, on the infrastructure, the roads, the hospitals, the schools, seeing no effect of these talents, these recourses is very frustrating. But it is the result of the damage that was done to the country, especially during the various military regimes.Collection: Country
There is something about important stories that is not just the message, but also the way that message is conveyed, the arrangement of the words, the felicity of the language. So it's really a balance between your commitment, whether it's political or economic or whatever, and your craft as an artist.Collection: Commitment
Unoka went into an inner room and soon returned with a small wooden disc containing a kola nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk. "I have kola," he announced when he sat down, and passed the disc over to his guest. "Thank you. He who brings kola brings life. But I think you ought to break it," replied Okoye passing back the disc. "No, it is for you, I think," and they argued like this for a few moments before Unoka accepted the honor of breaking the kola. Okoye, meanwhile, took the lump of chalk, drew some lines on the floor, and then painted his big toe.Collection: Thinking
Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly for ever.Collection: Real
A good leader for instance is somebody like Nelson Mandela. I do not have seen such people coming every generation, maybe every ten generations, every hundred generations. People who are miracle workers.Collection: People
If the clan did not exact punishment for an offense against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender. As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled all the others.Collection: Land
What really worries me is that those who are in positions of power are not really affected by what we are writing. In the moral dialogue you want to start, you really want to involve the leaders. People ask me: "Why were you so bold as to publish A Man of the People? How did you think the Government was going to take it? You didn't know there was going to be a coup?" I said rather flippantly that nobody was going to read it anyway, so I wasn't likely to be fired from my official position. It's a distressing thought that we cannot engage our leaders in the kind of moral debate we need.Collection: Writing
It's so easy to get into the same routine. A novel every two years; perhaps, improving technique. But I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in doing something fundamentally important--and therefore, it needs time. And what I've been doing, really, is avoiding this pressure to get into the habit of one novel a year. This is what is expected of novelists. And I have never been really too much concerned with doing what is expected of novelists, or writers, or artists. I want to do what I believe is important.Collection: Believe
I don't like to see mistakes on the typewriter. I like a perfect script. On the typewriter I will sometimes leave a phrase that is not right, not what I want, simply because to change it would be a bit messy.Collection: Mistake
The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.Collection: Self
My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don’t see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity. To make humanity uncomfortable, yes. But intrinsically to be against humanity, that I don’t take.Collection: Art
A pen on paper is the ideal way for me. I am not really very comfortable with machines; I never learned to type very well.Collection: Machines
The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.Collection: Trouble
We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.Collection: Integrity
Colonial rule means that power, initiative is taken away from you by somebody else who makes your decisions. If that goes on long enough, beyond one generation, then the habit of self-rule is forgotten. People are no longer able to realize what it means. To be dependant for a hundred years! And suddenly when this thing ends there is nobody who actually knows how to set about running the country.Collection: Running
What is modesty but inverted pride?Collection: Pride
Children are very fair minded, they really are.Collection: Children
Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselvesCollection: Mind
This is why I find racism impossible, because this is against humanity.Collection: Racism
There is no story that is not true.Collection: Stories
A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.Collection: Running
I think not just Nigeria but I think the whole of Africa has to turn back to the rural areas and that's where the majority of the citizens are and that's where the engine of of development has to be found.Collection: Thinking
A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.Collection: Brother
What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.Collection: Children
Every lizard lies on its belly, so we cannot tell which has a belly-acheCollection: Lying
Now one of the changes that must come to Africa is the idea of limited rule, I mean in term of how long one leader can stay in power. The era of president for life is not gone yet but it is on its way out and that is one of the problems with Mugabe and others.Collection: Mean
When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.Collection: Tree