Quotes from Chinua Achebe

There is no story that is not true.

Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.

If you don't like my story,write your own

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.

If I hold her hand she says, 'Don't touch!' If I hold her foot she says 'Don't touch!' But when I hold her waist-beads she pretends not to know.

One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.

Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.

Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate that the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself.

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.

The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.

Do not despair. I know you will not despair. You have a manly and a proud heart. A proud heart can survive a general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.

A child cannot pay for its mother's milk.

Nobody can teach me who I am.

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

You do not know me,' said Tortoise. 'I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.

Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.

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.

In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.

I'm amazed when I think about students today. They know from day one what they are going to be. We didn't. We just coasted. We just knew that things would work out.

A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.

I do not actually see how art, literature can be anything other that being in that domain of trying to tell us, trying to get us to see what is important in our lives.

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.

I don't care about age very much.