Nigerian writer (1930-2013)
If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
Come here into the hollow of my conscience
I will show you a thing or two
I will show you the heat of my love.
You know what?
I can give you babies too
Real leaders of tomorrow
Right here under the bridge
I can give you real leaders of thought.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?
CHINUA ACHEBE
Arrow of God
The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
But like all the other women I have referred to, she expressed herself with passionate and disarming effrontery.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
If one finger brings oil it soils the others.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Okike, 1990
The singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
There are two streams in the minds of our people: one in which women are really oppressed and given very low status and one in which they are given very high honour, sometimes even greater honour than men, at least if not in fact, in language and metaphor.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Conversations with Chinua Achebe
[Would] a sensible man spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune put in his mouth?
CHINUA ACHEBE
A Man of the People
The eye is not harmed by sleep.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
He who fights for a ne'er-do-well has nothing to show for it except a head covered in earth and grime.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
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 deep 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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
As a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Things Fall Apart
Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. An artist, in my definition of the word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
Despite the daunting problems of identity that beset our contemporary society, we can see in the horizon the beginnings of a new relationship between artist and community which will not flourish like the mango-trick in the twinkling of an eye but will rather, in the hard and bitter manner of David Diop's young tree, grow patiently and obstinately to the ultimate victory of liberty and fruition.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Arrow of God