Quotes by Chinua Achebe

...she was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quiet easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the peoples shit in buckets on his head.

Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.

The foreign correspondent is frequently the only means of getting an important story told, or of drawing the worlds attention to disasters in the making or being covered up. Such an important role is risky in more ways than one. It can expose the correspondent to actual physical danger; but there is also the moral danger of indulging in sensationalism and dehumanizing the sufferer. This danger immediately raises the question of the character and attitude of the correspondent, because the same qualities of mind which in the past separated a Conrad from a Livingstone, or a Gainsborough from the anonymous painter of Francis Williams, are still present and active in the world today. Perhaps this difference can best be put in one phrase: the presence or absence of respect for the human person.

The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So its a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.

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.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you dont just turn it off one day.

I dont care about age very much.

I dont 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.

I tell my students, its not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. Whats more difficult is to identify with someone you dont see, whos very far away, whos a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

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 wasnt perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.

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.

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

The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.

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

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

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

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 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.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.