Chinua Achebe
I do not think that there is any time in our history when things were perfect. I do not expect such times in the near future either. But I think every generation has to examine what needs to be done, what belongs to its peace and proceed. And so what needs to be done will change with time depending on the conditions, whatever the conditions happen to be. And they will not be the same for generation after generation.Collection: Thinking
That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant.Collection: Ignorant
Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.Collection: Writing
Art is created to make us, to make our passage through the world better, fruitful - and I would say that every story in the end, if it is good, tells us something. This is actually what I meant when I said a novelist is a teacher. Which is why I am constantly dealing with "didactic". Now a teacher in the sense I use it is not somebody who has the profession of standing in front of children, with a piece of chalk in his hand scribbling on the blackboard. That is not the teacher I have in mind. The teacher I have in mind is something less tangible.Collection: Teacher
Naming is like putting a stamp on something and fixing it. A kind of formaldehyde sort of fixation, but it becomes dead, sitting there forever, frozen. So, I'm not a great one for these modernist, post modernist, post colonial labels. I think they serve certain purpose. You do need some kind of sign post here and there, but it can also become an end in itself.Collection: Thinking
Procrastination is a lazy man's apology.Collection: Procrastination
We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.Collection: Hurt
An angry man is always a stupid man.Collection: Stupid
To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor's real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume!Collection: Real
The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.Collection: Dancing
As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.Collection: Justice
Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.Collection: Tasks
Mosquito [...] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. "How much longer do you think you will live?" she asked. "You are already a skeleton." Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.Collection: Laughter
Diversity is not an abnormality but the very reality of our planet. The human world manifests the same reality and will not seek our permission to celebrate itself in the magnificence of its endless varieties. Civility is a sensible attribute in this kind of world we have; narrowness of heart and mind is not.Collection: Heart
Man is sitting disconsolate on an anthill one morning. God asks him what the matter is and man replies that the soil is too swampy for the cultivation of the yams which God has directed him to grow. God tells him to bring in a blacksmith to dry the soil with his bellows. The contribution of humanity to this creation is so important. God could have made the world perfect if he had wanted. But he made it the way it is. So that there is a constant need for us to discuss and cooperate to make it more habitable, so the soil can yield, you see.Collection: Morning
We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.Collection: Humanity
Just think of the work you've set yourself to do, and do it as well as you can.Collection: Thinking
A goat does not eat into a hen's stomach no matter how friendly the two may be.Collection: Two
Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.Collection: Imagination
Nigeria is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.Collection: Leader
Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig.Collection: Men
Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.Collection: Men
The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.Collection: Shine On
There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.Collection: Thinking
...when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.Collection: Running
If you have leaders who are prepared to incite group against group it is very easy to manufacture reasons and excuses.Collection: Leader
When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.Collection: Men
Art should be on the side of humanity.Collection: Art
After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.Collection: War
[Would] a sensible man spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune put in his mouth?Collection: Men
Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.Collection: Fire
When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things, even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp... Fascinating to me because they were about things remote, and almost ethereal.Collection: School
I'm amazed when I think about students today. They know from day one what they are going to be. We didn't. We just coasted. We just knew that things would work out.Collection: Thinking
When I was in England, I had seen advertisements about typing agencies; I had learned that if you really want to make a good impression, you should have your manuscript well typed.Collection: Agency
I don't praise my people. I am their greatest critic.Collection: People
Poetry and slave trading cannot be bedfellows. That's where I stand.Collection: Slave
If you ask me, Now, is it your best book? I would say, I don't really know. I wouldn't even want to say. And I'd even go on and say, I don't even think so.Collection: Book
I have found that I work best when I am at home in Nigeria. But one learns to work in other places.Collection: Home
I am not an early-morning person; I don't like to get out of bed, and so I don't begin writing at five A.M., though some people, I hear, do. I write once my day has started. And I can work late into the night, also.Collection: Morning
A budding writer wants to be encouraged.Collection: Want
"We have heard stories about white men who make the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas, but no one thought the stories were true." [said Obierika]"There is no story that is not true," said Uchendu. "The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others. We have albinos among us. Do you not think that they came to our clan by mistake, that they have strayed from their way to a land where everybody is like them?"Collection: Strong
I have so many ideas; there are so many things that need to be done, so many possibilities, you know; one is terribly excited, but at the same time, you're almost confused, because you don't know where to begin.Collection: Confused
It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.Collection: Purpose
She pouted her lips like a gun in my face.Collection: Gun
This is not pessimism but rather casting a cold eye on things. It is only one man's story, and I think that things will go better, but difficulties exist and nothing is served by hiding them under a poetic veil or under a lyricism of the past. I am against slogans.Collection: Eye
Generally, I don't attempt to produce a certain number of words a day. The discipline is to work whether you are producing a lot or not, because the day you produce a lot is not necessarily the day you do your best work. So it's trying to do it as regularly as you can without making it - without imposing too rigid a timetable on your self. That would be my ideal.Collection: Self
My books have done extremely well, I know. But I don't honestly feel much different from when I began to write. I still think we have a long way to go. I suppose my name means more in Nigeria today than it did five years ago. But I feel the job that literature should do in our community has not even started. It's not yet part of the life of the nation. We are still at the beginning. It's a big beginning, because now we are catching the next generation in the schools. When I was their age, I had nothing to read that had any relevance to my own environment.Collection: Jobs
I find Nigeria very frustrating. I am not alone in this. There are many Nigerians abroad. As you know, the brain drain is just incredible. And when we talk to one another and there is a certain sense of frustration and but I struggle not to let the frustration degenerate into dispair.Collection: Struggle
The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor's domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.Collection: Way