It’s the place to begin, always — to return to home, literally.
WOLE SOYINKAI began writing early – very, very early… I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, ‘Now I’m a writer.’ I’ve always been a writer.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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But when you’re deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it’s amazing.
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But theater, because of its nature, both text, images, multimedia effects, has a wider base of communication with an audience. That’s why I call it the most social of the various art forms.
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Culture is a matrix of infinite possibilities and choices. From within the same culture matrix we can extract arguments and strategies for the degradation and ennoblement of our species, for its enslavement or liberation, for the suppression of its productive potential or its enhancement.
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Looking at faces of people, one gets the feeling there’s a lot of work to be done.
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Don’t take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
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The media must be used effectively to reach the masses. You have to find a new language in which to address the people and demonstrate what is possible.
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No man beholds his mother’s womb Yet who denies it’s there? Coiled To the navel of the world is that Endless cord that links us all To the great Origin. If I lose my way. The trailing cord will bring me to the roots.
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The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
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Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.
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We do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.
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I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you’re actually sitting down putting words to the paper.
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Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself.
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My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain point, I had a tendency to make up my own elementary variations on stories I had heard, or to invent totally new ones.
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History teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accompany their righteous thirst for justice.
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But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That’s all.
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I don’t know any other way to live but to wake up everyday armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me.
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Each time I think Ive created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.
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Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.
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I am a very curious person; I’ll always ask: is this thing true, is it not true? And I use my own means to investigate and come to my conclusion.
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I’m not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I’ve never understood.
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I never hesitated, as a student, in embracing the necessity of violence. In South Africa, I didn’t just accept it; I looked forward to it as a mission.
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Intolerance has always been with us, you know. The moment you have ideology, we have intolerance, whether it’s the secular ideology or, you know ideocratic ideology, which always brings with it some kind of intolerance.
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My definition of slavery is the deprivation of human volition, any form of relationship between two peoples which is based on the deprivation of volition of one side.
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Intolerance has become, I think, the reigning ideology of the world today, the intolerance versus intolerance and it’s taken on lethal proportions.
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I have one abiding religion-human liberty.
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Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
WOLE SOYINKA