About Chinua Achebe: Chinua Achebe is the most widely read book in modern African literature.
When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.
The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
Nigera is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.
When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.
The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and s...
The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it's a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.
Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.
When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.
What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.
An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.
Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation.
Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.
I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.
I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. That's different from prescribing a way in which a writer should write.
There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.
I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.
Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country.
Many writers can't make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don't really know about its value to the student. I don't mean it's useless. But I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write.
A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness
