Wole Soyinka Quotes
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Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself.
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I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.
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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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My 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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Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.
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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 don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
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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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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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One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.
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The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice. The proof of that is the ability of a dictator to snuff out the life of a writer.
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Pity you can't be present during my periodic fault-finding sessions with my image in the mirror!
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Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it.
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We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.
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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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You cannot live a normal existence if you haven't taken care of a problem that affects your life and affects the lives of others, values that you hold which in fact define your very existence.
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A human feast is an indifferent morsel to a god.
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We wasted a lot of creative energy in that immediate post colonial era, when there was a struggle between, you know, the Cold War between the capitalism and communism. Many writers just wasted their energy and their talent because they want to be ideologically correct and of course all they produced was propaganda.
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For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity.
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And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.
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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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There's something about the theater which makes my fingertips tingle.
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We all have our individual artistic temperaments as well as partisanships in creative directions. And we have strong opinions on the merits of the products of our occupation.
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I think I'm a very lazy writer and by that I mean that I do not battle, I don't struggle too hard against it. If I have difficulties in the writing, I just go and do other things. I don't feel a compulsion to write.