Chinua Achebe
I'm very primitive; I write with a pen.Collection: Writing
I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write. That's my own taste. I prefer to stumble on it.Collection: Writing
You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.Collection: Baby
Once you have really done all you can, then you can show it to people. But I find this is increasingly not the case with the younger people. They do a first draft and want somebody to finish it off for them with good advice.Collection: People
The rural areas have been deprived by the cities in the past. Development resources and energy should be directed where the people live.Collection: Past
The market literature, which was particularly strong in Igboland, in Onitsha, today it is no longer strong. It is one of the victims of the civil war, that market was actually destroyed and at the end of the war a new Nigeria has struggled to come into being and I believe that what is probably going to replace the market literature might be the video, which they have taken to in a big way, creating dramas. So that may be the next thing way we will see coming out of the local basic level in our society.Collection: Strong
Anybody who wants to rule a group will find that if this group is quarreling among themselves they leave you alone.Collection: Groups
You don't ever want to say to a young person, You can't, or, You are no good. Some people might be able to do it, but I don't think I am a policeman for literature. So I tell them, Sweat it out, do your best.Collection: Thinking
Actually, I identify with all my characters, good and bad. I have to do that in order to make them genuine. I have to understand them even if I don't approve of them. Not completely - it's impossible; complete identification is, in fact, not desirable.Collection: Character
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.Collection: Different
I think that is one of the first things that I got clear in my mind when I began to play around with fiction, that I had to find a language and it was not in existance at the time. You have put it very well - it wasn't to be taken for granted. You had to go on and search until you found a way through the conversation of English and Igbo. The two languages stuck into each other and tried to find a way to express through one, the medium of the thoughts. That's a very exciting thing to do, a very difficult thing to do.Collection: Taken
Even the village rain-maker no longer claimed to be able to intervene. He could not stop the rain now, just as he would not attempt to start it in the heart of the dry season, without serious danger to his own health.Collection: Rain
I teach literature. That's easy for me. Take someone else's work and talk about it.Collection: Literature
There are things the story must have or else look incomplete. And these will almost automatically present themselves. When they don't, you are in trouble and then the novel stops.Collection: Looks
If you had been poor in your last life I would have asked you to be rich when you come again. But you were rich. If you had been a coward, I would have asked you to bring courage. But you were a fearless warrior. If you had died young, I would have asked you to get life. But you lived long. So I shall ask you to come again the way you came before.Collection: Warrior
He who fights for a ne'er-do-well has nothing to show for it except a head covered in earth and grime.Collection: Fighting
What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.Collection: Writing
You must develop the habit of skepticism, not swallow every piece of superstition you are told by witch-doctors and professors.Collection: Witch Doctors
When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.Collection: Men
An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.Collection: Art
One reason why I am quite angry with what is happening in Nigeria today is that everything has collapsed. If I decide to go back now, there will be so many problems - where will I find the physical therapy and other things that I now require?Collection: Doctors
When I'm writing, I really want to satisfy myself. I've got a story that I am working on and struggling with, and I want to tell it the most effective way I can. That's really what I struggle with. And the thought of who may be reading it may be there somewhere in the back of my mind - I'll never say it's not there because I don't know - but it's not really what I'm thinking about.Collection: Struggle
When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouthCollection: Mother
Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray-a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical & moral deformitiesCollection: Europe
It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.Collection: Important
If you're rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world's stories should be told - from many different perspectives.Collection: Moving
I don't want to be the one to tell somebody, You will not make it, even though I know that the majority of those who come to me with their manuscripts are not really good enough.Collection: Majority
In such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest-without asking to be paid.Collection: Life
I grew up recognizing that there was nobody to give me any advice and that you do your best and if it's not good enough, someday you will come to terms with that.Collection: Giving
It is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors.Collection: People
The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.Collection: Believe
...Nothing puzzles GodCollection: Puzzles
I did not think of writing as a career and I don't think that I did this ever really, but I think of writing as something that I could do, I should do alongside whatever else I was doing. It simply grew on me.Collection: Writing
Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.Collection: Writing
If you were to loose the habit of making the effort to get the book and read the words one by one you would have lost something terribly important. So I think that we have a task to ensure that this doesn't happen.Collection: Book
When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walkCollection: Inspirational
A toad does not run in the daytime for nothingCollection: Running
We don't want to be simply wandering about without some kind of reason, we want our presence here to have a purpose, and that we are not going to end here, we are going to proceed somewhere else, and also that we didn't begin here, that we began somewhere else and all that living, all that elaborate account of our presence seems to be quite basic to our nature and so this is what literacy taps into.Collection: Somewhere Else
An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverbCollection: Okonkwo
If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?Collection: Country
As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look.Collection: Father
I do not actually see how art, literature can be anything other that being in that domain of trying to tell us, trying to get us to see what is important in our lives.Collection: Art
We live in a sea of general ideas, so that's not a novel, since there are so many general ideas. But the moment a particular idea is linked to a character, it's like an engine moves it. Then you have a novel underway.Collection: Moving
Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.Collection: Creativity
Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!Collection: Giving
Beware Okonkwo!" she warned. "Beware of exchanging words with Agbala. Does a man speak when a god speaks? Beware!Collection: Men
When I think of the standing, the importance and the erudition of all these people who see nothing about racism in Heart of Darkness, I'm convinced that we must really be living in different worlds.Collection: Heart
In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.Collection: Vocabulary
There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.Collection: Men