Top 225 Quotes & Sayings by Wole Soyinka
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Nigerian novelist Wole Soyinka.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
The Lagos of my childhood was a well-laid-out maritime city.
Given the scale of trauma caused by the genocide, Rwanda has indicated that however thin the hope of a community can be, a hero always emerges. Although no one can dare claim that it is now a perfect state, and that no more work is needed, Rwanda has risen from the ashes as a model or truth and reconciliation.
I like my peace and quiet whenever I can grab it.
I'm an Afro-realist. I take what comes, and I do my best to affect what is unacceptable in society.
There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?
But theater, because of its nature, both text, images, multimedia effects, has a wider base of communication with an audience. That's why I call it the most social of the various art forms.
I am a glutton for tranquility.
Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves regimented by aliens from outer space.
Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it.
Seven is the magic figure, because that's a symbolic figure of my favorite deity, Ogun.
After the death of the sadistic dictator Gen. Sanni Abacha in 1998, Nigeria underwent a one-year transitional military administration headed by Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, who uncharacteristically bowed out precisely on the promised date for military disengagement. Did the military truly disengage, however? No.
Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.
Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for.
I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.
If African film makers had one-tenth the amount commanded by film makers the world over - even the amount used by so-called shoestring film makers - I think we would see quite an explosion of African films on the world scene.
My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
I found, when I left, that there were others who felt the same way. We'd meet, they'd come and seek me out, we'd talk about the future. And I found that their depression and pessimism was every bit as acute as mine.
Education is lacking in most of those who pontificate.
Looking at faces of people, one gets the feeling there's a lot of work to be done.
One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.
Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress the truth.
I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we'd never smelled the fumes of petroleum.
The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
A tiger does not shout its tigritude, it acts.
The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.
Human life has meaning only to that degree and as long as it is lived in the service of humanity.
I'm not sure I'm trying to communicate a message. I'm just trying to be part of the movement away from the unacceptable present.
I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.
I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture.
For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity.
Politics, I believe, is a full-time occupation.
I love beauty. But I like the beauty accidentally, not dished up, served up on a platter.
The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices.
I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
Some people think the Nobel Prize makes you bullet-proof. I never had that illusion.
The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.
I like to say, 'I spend one-third of my time in Nigeria, one-third in Europe or America, and one-third on a plane.'
I take friendship very seriously.
But when you're deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it's amazing.
I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.
I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.
Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.
I don't know any other way to live but to wake up every day armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me.
Just like birds, hunters know no borders.
Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped.
When I write plays, I'm already seeing the shapes on stage, of the actors and their interaction, and so on and so forth. I don't think I've ever written one play as an abstract piece, as a literary piece, floating in the air somewhere, to be flushed out later on.
One's own self-worth is tied to the worth of the community to which one belongs, which is intimately connected to humanity in general. What happens in Darfur becomes an assault on my own community, and on me as an individual. That's what the human family is all about.
And gradually they're beginning to recognize the fact that there's nothing more secure than a democratic, accountable, and participatory form of government. But it's sunk in only theoretically, it has not yet sunk in completely in practical terms.
But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That's all.
Each time I think I've created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.
One has a responsibility to clean up one's space and make it livable as far as one's own resources go. That includes not only material resources, but psychological resources: the commitment of time and a portion of your mind to something when you'd rather be doing something else.
There's no way to escape the culture that has evolved, from which we ourselves have evolved. Naturally, we stress it, break it up, reassemble it to suit our own needs. But it is there - a source of vital strength.
The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.
You cannot live a normal existence if you haven't taken care of a problem that affects your life and affects the lives of others, values that you hold which in fact define your very existence.
Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.
A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment more than buildings: It must shatter the foundations of thought and re-create. Only in this way does every individual share in the cataclysm and understand the purpose of sacrifice.
No writer has a right to make that much money. Indeed, without diabolical assistance, no writer can.
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