Quotes by Wole Soyinka

About Wole Soyinka:

Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Babatunde Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honored in that category.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves regimented by aliens from outer space.

Wole Soyinka

I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.

Wole Soyinka

There are different kinds of artists and very often, I'll be very frank with you, I wish I were a different kind.

Wole Soyinka

A tiger does not shout its tigritude, it acts.

Wole Soyinka

Just like birds, hunters know no borders.

Wole Soyinka

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.

Wole Soyinka

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

Wole Soyinka

No human is completely fearless.

Wole Soyinka

Nigeria has had the misfortune - no, the fortune - of seeing the worst face of capitalism anywhere in Africa. The masses have seen it, they are disgusted, and they want an alternative.

Wole Soyinka

The Lagos of my childhood was a well-laid-out maritime city.

Wole Soyinka

Military dictatorship, you can focus on it, you can fight it directly. It's a band of power-driven people.

Wole Soyinka

We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.

Wole Soyinka

I am a glutton for tranquility.

Wole Soyinka

I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.

Wole Soyinka

One, a mass movement from within, which, as you know, is constantly being put down brutally but which, again, regroups and moves forward as is happening right now as we are speaking.

Wole Soyinka

The scales of reckoning with mortality are never evenly weighted, alas, and thus it is on the shoulders of the living that the burden of justice must continue to rest.

Wole Soyinka

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.

Wole Soyinka

Some people think the Nobel Prize makes you bullet-proof. I never had that illusion.

Wole Soyinka

All religions accept that there is something called 'criminality.' And criminality cannot be excused by religious fervour.

Wole Soyinka

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.

Wole Soyinka

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.

Wole Soyinka

Author Bio

  • NameWole Soyinka
  • DescriptionNigerian writer
  • AliasesAkinwande Oluwole Soyinka
  • BornJuly 13, 1934
  • CountryNigeria
  • ProfessionPlaywright; Poet; Writer; Novelist; Philosopher; Essayist
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature