For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity.
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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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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And gradually they’re beginning to recognize the fact that there’s nothing more secure than a democratic, accountable, and participatory form of government. But it’s sunk in only theoretically, it has not yet sunk in completely in practical terms.
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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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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.
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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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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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If man cannot, what god dare claim perfection?
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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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I don’t really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
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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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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.
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And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.
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Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.
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It’s the place to begin, always — to return to home, literally.
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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.
WOLE SOYINKA