Quotes from Chinua Achebe

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

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.

A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.

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 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.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

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!

I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.

There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.

The lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.

The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.

I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.

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

My son even if you want to fall, at least fall where your bones can be gathered

Anybody who wants to rule a group will find that if this group is quarreling among themselves they leave you alone.

If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect.

I think dialects should be left alone. People should write in whatever dialect they feel they want to write. In the fullness of time, these dialects will sort themselves out.

If you ask me, Now, is it your best book? I would say, I don't really know. I wouldn't even want to say. And I'd even go on and say, I don't even think so.