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 SOYINKAI cannot accept the definition of collective good as articulated by a privileged minority in society, especially when that minority is in power.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself.
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 -
As a global citizen, I sometimes feel like denying my identity.
WOLE SOYINKA -
Governance can dig itself into a huge hole and not even know it’s in there.
WOLE SOYINKA -
But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That’s all.
WOLE SOYINKA -
The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
WOLE SOYINKA -
Religion has really spawned some monsters. It always has, historically. Go all the way back to the Inquisition, you know, the Crusades, the Jehad and so on.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.
WOLE SOYINKA -
We do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.
WOLE SOYINKA -
Intolerance has become, I think, the reigning ideology of the world today, the intolerance versus intolerance and it’s taken on lethal proportions.
WOLE SOYINKA