Chinua Achebe

“The impatient idealist says: 'Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.' But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.”

“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.”

“Looking at a king's mouth, ' said an old man, 'one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast.”

“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.”

“I don't care about age very much. I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.”

“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.”

“When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk”

“What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.”

“The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!”

“My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.”

“The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.”

“A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness”

“In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything.”

“People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that's the time to do something about it, not when it's around your neck.”

“Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.”

“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 slavery.”

“Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.”

“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.”

“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. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.”

“The most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don't expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room.”