My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience.
WOLE SOYINKAThe man dies in all those that keep silent.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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I 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.
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I have one abiding religion-human liberty.
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The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.
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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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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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For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.
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I can look violence in the face and either reject or accept it.
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We do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.
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Let’s say there are prospects for a new Nigeria, but I don’t think we have a new Nigeria yet.
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Well, the first thing is that truth and power for me form an antithesis, an antagonism, which will hardly ever be resolved. I can define in fact, can simplify the history of human society, the evolution of human society, as a contest between power and freedom.
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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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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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But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That’s all.
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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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Sadness is twilight’s kiss on earth.
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There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other people.
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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 am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we’d never smelled the fumes of petroleum.
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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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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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When a leader encourages the culture of impunity, the society is lost and it makes the work harder for the rest of us.
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Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you’re deprived of it.
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Mythology can be used, and has been used, even to re-state, you know, the very urgent problems of the world.
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You cannot live a normal existence if you haven’t taken care of a problem that affects your life and affects the lives of others, values that you hold which in fact define your very existence.
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I rarely use mythology for its own sake because, as a theatre person, the mythological figures are in fact humanity to the ninth degree and Yoruba mythology in particular has fascination of being one of the most humanised mythologies in the world.
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See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.
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