410 Quotes by Chinua Achebe

Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country.

An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.

When I think of the standing, the importance and the erudition of all these people who see nothing about racism in Heart of Darkness, I'm convinced that we must really be living in different worlds.

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.

Mosquito [...] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. "How much longer do you think you will live?" she asked. "You are already a skeleton." Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.

One reason why I am quite angry with what is happening in Nigeria today is that everything has collapsed. If I decide to go back now, there will be so many problems - where will I find the physical therapy and other things that I now require? Will the doctors, who are leaving in droves, coming to America, going to everywhere in the world - Saudi Arabia - how many of them will be there? The universities have almost completely lost their faculties and are hardly ever in session, shut down for one reason or another.

There must be areas in which a particular character does not represent you.

What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.

Ogbuef Ezedudu,who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men when they came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan. "It has not always been so," he said. "My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. but after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.