What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that’s my function, but from time to time it’s possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.
WOLE SOYINKAGovernance can dig itself into a huge hole and not even know it’s in there.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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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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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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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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It is the human potentials that interest me. I travel and everywhere I go I am amazed at the presence of Nigerians. The intelligence, integrity, productivity, initiative.
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Romance is the sweetening of the soul With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.
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I said: “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces”. In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: “I am a tiger”. When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.
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The youth should come together to challenge the status quo. They must not give up.
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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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When you are looking for corruption, you should look at the entire stratum of the society, while some forms of corruption are direct, others are indirect.
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When I say war, I’m not talking about mental war; I’m talking about totally eliminating the obstacles to transformation of our children.
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Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself.
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As a global citizen, I sometimes feel like denying my identity.
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I don’t really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
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I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.
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The man dies in all those that keep silent.
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There’s a lot of insincerity about the actions of our legislators; they create distractions – like this anti-gay law you alluded to – and try to mobilise, to exacerbate people’s emotions. Until the legislators started making laws, people minded, generally, their own business.
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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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I cannot accept the definition of collective good as articulated by a privileged minority in society, especially when that minority is in power.
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Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
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Everybody knows that fraternities are a normal culture in all colleges. It exists in all colleges. President Clinton was a member of a fraternity. In fact, anybody who goes to College in the United States is a member of a College fraternity. There is absolutely nothing evil or occultic about fraternity.
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Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.
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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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. . . as far as the regime is concerned, well, the play is sheer terror for them. Because they feel, How dare – how dare anybody lift his or her voice in criticism against us? We have the guns. Their level of paranoia and power-drunkenness is unbelievable.
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I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don’t function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I’m even ready to write.
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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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I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.
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