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. . . 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.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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You accept whoever you are interacting with, directly, or indirectly.
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Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
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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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Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.
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I don’t really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
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Don’t take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
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A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.
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The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.
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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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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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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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A human feast is an indifferent morsel to a god.
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We all have our individual artistic temperaments as well as partisanships in creative directions. And we have strong opinions on the merits of the products of our occupation.
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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’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.
WOLE SOYINKA