I have no money to give to you but I have ideas and organizational capacity.
WOLE SOYINKASee, 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.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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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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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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I can look violence in the face and either reject or accept it.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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 SOYINKA -
Sadness is twilight’s kiss on earth.
WOLE SOYINKA -
Governance can dig itself into a huge hole and not even know it’s in there.
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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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
. . . 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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.
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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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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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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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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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Each time I think Ive created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.
WOLE SOYINKA