Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.
WOLE SOYINKAI have one abiding religion-human liberty.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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I can look violence in the face and either reject or accept it.
WOLE SOYINKA -
Alfred Nobel regretted that his invention, dynamite, was converted to degrading use, hence his creation of the Nobel Prize, as the humanist counter to the destructive power of his genius.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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.
WOLE SOYINKA -
You accept whoever you are interacting with, directly, or indirectly.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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 -
For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.
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 -
Romance is the sweetening of the soul With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.
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 -
And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.
WOLE SOYINKA -
There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?
WOLE SOYINKA -
I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you’re actually sitting down putting words to the paper.
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 -
As a global citizen, I sometimes feel like denying my identity.
WOLE SOYINKA -
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.
WOLE SOYINKA