Cyprian Ekwensi

“He looked out of the window, as if the interview gave him some pain, and for a moment I studied him silently.”

“No, I didn't have any feeling that something as disastrous as this would happen, but everyone had a feeling of impending disaster from the way the census figures were being rigged. From the way the election results were being played with. Everybody felt that something was coming, something really ominous, but nobody could predict the depth of it, and we all had this sense of doom hanging over us. In fact, the word revolution was mentioned several times, but it was a strange thing; no one had ever had what a revolution was or experienced it, but people knew something bad was coming.”

“Literature has the task of molding character. It has the task of glorifying Courage, focusing ambition, directing, and giving life. These are the things that literature can do, and the biggest task of all that literature has is that the writer, in whatever sense, is a teacher. He is a man who explores new avenues of life, and therefore he is a guide into these new avenues.”

“"He said he loved Ojuelegba. The noise and vibes of the area fired his creativity. Silent places like Lagos Island wouldn’t have inspired him," by Uduma Kalu.”

“I got the impulse to write at the Government College, Ibadan. We had a very good library and teachers who were oriented towards literature. Most of the emphasis was on English literature, English history. And we used a series of textbooks in English by Lancelot Oliphant called a Progressive English course, in which the teaching was done by extracts from literature and then the grammar and syntax came of these texts.”