Wole Soyinka Quotes
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Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself.
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Mythology can be used, and has been used, even to re-state, you know, the very urgent problems of the world.
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I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.
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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.
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There are different kinds of artists and very often, I'll be very frank with you, I wish I were a different kind.
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I have one abiding religion-human liberty.
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The man dies in all those that keep silent.
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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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As a president, you've got to show some example. I am disturbed for instance when I read that a candidate said, 'I will not probe anybody or something like that'. You don't fight corruption by sweeping everything under the carpet, you don't. You just say, am going to allow the law take its course; I am going to empower the agencies which has been set up for such specific purpose of stemming the corrupt out flow of resources from this nation and don't even talk to me about corruption beyond saying you going to strengthen existing institutions.
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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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Of course I've enjoyed having the Nobel Prize, the prestige that goes along with it, the money that came with it in particular. I was the typical, still am to some extent, impecunious writer, just struggling to make ends meet, so that, nobody's going to deny that at all. In fact, if they want to give it to me a second time, I'm standing by, ready to receive it, but it's a problem, it's a real problem and then expectations and then you have monsters like Sani Abacha who come up from time to time and who would have died a happy man if he'd succeeded in hanging a Nobel Laureate for literature.
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My mind immediately shot to South Africa the moment I sat down to think what I was going to write, what I was going to say. There was no other choice.
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People say human nature is a very vague expression, people tend to say human nature is corruptible anyway and it comes from a theological point of view, goes back to the Garden of Eden, that there is always this corrupt gene waiting to be activated that we inherited from the very beginning. I don't believe in that theological excuse.
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For many playwrights, they write the plays anyway because they've got to be, the work has been started, it's got to be finished, but we all long, I think, to see the plays fleshed out on stage and I'm exactly like that. Yes, I'm not satisfied until I actually see it on stage.
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Wole SoyinkaMy horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
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There's something about the theater which makes my fingertips tingle.
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The idea of having to make constant reference to politics is anathema to my calling as a writer.
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I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
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If you are corrupt and you have extra cash you are able to shut the mouth of your accuser and they will be silenced.
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Only 4 sets of people can vote for the PDP: those who are intellectually blind; those who are blinded by ethnicity; those who are blinded by corruption and therefore afraid of the unknown, should power change hands; and finally those who are suffering from a combination of the above terminal sicknesses.
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I know there are other writers who sit down religiously every morning, they take their espresso, they put a clean sheet of paper there and they sit looking at that paper until they've finished or covered at least a number of those pages. No, I'm not like that. I have to be ready. It has to gestate it for quite a while and then it's ready to burst forth.
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Don't feel that you have to tailor your literature a particular way to please any school of ideology. There will emerge in its own right, effortlessly, some kind of ideological direction which is a reflection of your thinking and you want your thinking, above all.
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When you fight corruption, corruption strikes back and that is the truth because when you fight corruption, you get confidence and when it gets to impunity, then it gets aggressive and says, 'oh, so you think you are different? You think you are tough and different?' This is why some of us are almost permanently in the libel court.
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I 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.