The writer is the visionary of his people… He anticipates, he warns.
WOLE SOYINKAMy 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.
More Wole Soyinka Quotes
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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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We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.
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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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I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you’re actually sitting down putting words to the paper.
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There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other people.
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A human feast is an indifferent morsel to a god.
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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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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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I have no money to give to you but I have ideas and organizational capacity.
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The media must be used effectively to reach the masses. You have to find a new language in which to address the people and demonstrate what is possible.
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But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That’s all.
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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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Intolerance has always been with us, you know. The moment you have ideology, we have intolerance, whether it’s the secular ideology or, you know ideocratic ideology, which always brings with it some kind of intolerance.
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For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity.
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I have one abiding religion-human liberty.
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