Chinua Achebe
I prefer to go on trying all kinds of things, not to be told, This is the way it is done.Collection: Trying
You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Who ever planted an iroko tree — the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with the greatness in men.Collection: Greatness
A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with every-day herbs.Collection: Disease
Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.Collection: Party
It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.Collection: Memories
We live in a society that is in transition from oral to written. There are oral stories that are still there, not exactly in their full magnificence, but still strong in their differentness from written stories. Each mode has its ways and methods and rules. They can reinforce each other; this is the advantage my generation has - we can bring to the written story something of that energy of the story told by word of mouth.Collection: Strong
Every generation must find its mission and fulfill it, as Fanon said - or betray it. So it is not something that you can write up on the wall, saying this is what has to be done. Every generation has to discover what it needs to do.Collection: Wall
My weapon is literatureCollection: Literature
Almost 30 years before Rwanda, before Darfur, more than 2 million people - mothers, children, babies, civilians - lost their lives as a result of the blatantly callous and unnecessary policies enacted by the leaders of the federal government of Nigeria. It's this charge that's dominated the book's Nigerian press, so far as I can see, the accusation, on the one hand, that Awolowo hatched "a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation - eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.Collection: Mother
Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes.Collection: Children
Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.Collection: War
Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.Collection: Kings
Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.Collection: Girl
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.Collection: Different
Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too – If one says no to the other, let his wing break.Collection: Eagles
People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.Collection: People
For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.Collection: Reading
My son even if you want to fall, at least fall where your bones can be gatheredCollection: Fall
I try as hard as possible not to be pessimistic because I have never thought or believed that creating a Nigerian nation would be easy; I have always known that it was going to be a very tough job. But I never really thought that it would be this tough. And what's going on now, which is a subjection of this potentially great country to a clique of military adventurers and a political class that they have completely corrupted - this is really quite appalling. The suffering that they have unleashed on millions of people is quite intolerable.Collection: Country
There is a certain increase in the importance I assign to women in getting us out of the mess that we are in, which is a reflection of the role of women in my traditional culture - that they do not interfere in politics until men really make such a mess that the society is unable to go backward or forward. Then women will move in.Collection: Moving
Women and music should not be dated.Collection: Should
The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.Collection: Real
It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.Collection: Men
Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.Collection: Art
What a man does not know is greater than he.Collection: Men
You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.Collection: Men
If you don't like someone's story, write your own. If you don't like what somebody says, say what it is you don't like.Collection: Writing
The singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world.Collection: World
The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.Collection: Men
The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.Collection: People
And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.Collection: Fiction
The ordinary Nigerians have lived as neighbors down the millennia. I was talking about the British who came and merged a whole number of mini states and big states into one unit. But those people were always there, and they always managed to live side by side with their neighbours. So they were not owned or run by one kingdom. It was not practically impossible for these people when they have different languages and religions to be neighbors. So it is that habit of neighbourliness which is destroyed and put under great strain again and again when you have things like massacres.Collection: Running
I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.Collection: People
If one finger brings oil it soils the others.Collection: Oil
Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That's not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.Collection: Children
At the most one could say that his chi or ... personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed.Collection: Men
Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write.Collection: Writing
Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate that the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself.Collection: Heart
Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.Collection: Simple
The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of reeducation and regeneration that must be done. In fact, he should march right in front.Collection: Black
I think once you have done all you can to a manuscript, let it find its way in the world.Collection: Thinking
A boy sent by his father to steal does not go stealthily but breaks the door with his feet.Collection: Father
When a new saying gets to the land of empty men, they lose their heads over it.Collection: Men
Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To fill the Lord's holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamoring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life - to drive the crowd away from His church.Collection: Should Have
The Novelist As Teacher”: “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.Collection: Teacher
To the question of writing at all we have sometimes been counselled to forget it, or rather the writing of books. What is required, we are told, is plays and films. Books are out of date! The book is dead, long live television! One question which is not even raised let alone considered is: Who will write the drama and film scripts when the generation that can read and write has been used up?Collection: Drama
The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.Collection: Running
A chief does not hurry.Collection: Doe