For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.
WOLE SOYINKAI 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.
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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The man dies in all those that keep silent.
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Don’t take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
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A human feast is an indifferent morsel to a god.
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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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Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.
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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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My definition of slavery is the deprivation of human volition, any form of relationship between two peoples which is based on the deprivation of volition of one side.
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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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I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.
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Arts and the Sciences are a natural symbiosis. They stem from the same human existential impulse – exploration. Exploration of what lies beneath the surface, and re-confuguration of elements of what we call reality.
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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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Well, the first thing is that truth and power for me form an antithesis, an antagonism, which will hardly ever be resolved. I can define in fact, can simplify the history of human society, the evolution of human society, as a contest between power and freedom.
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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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Let’s say there are prospects for a new Nigeria, but I don’t think we have a new Nigeria yet.
WOLE SOYINKA