Chinua Achebe

“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.”

“I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.”

“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.”

“A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.”

“People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.”

“Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.”

“The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic.”

“When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.”

“When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth”

“My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don't see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity.”

“When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.”

“People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.”

“An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.”

“But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.”

“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.”

“רק הסיפור מאריך ימים מכל צלילי תופי המלחמה ומעשי הגיבורים האמיצים." ~ מתוך "Anthills of the Savannah”

“הסיפור הוא הליווי שלנו, בלעדיו אנחנו עיוורים. האם המלווה של אדם עיוור הוא רכושו? לא, כך גם הסיפור אינו רכושנו; להפך, יותר אנחנו שייכים לו.”

“Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.”

“A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.”

“A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.”