Chinua Achebe

“Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.”

“The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.”

“I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.”

“In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.”

“The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!”

“Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.”

“A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.”

“But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.”

“I've had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the country because of difference in religion. These are things we should put behind us.”

“When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.”

“My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.”

“People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that's the time to do something about it, not when it's around your neck.”

“When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.”