Latest Chinua Achebe Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I think that is one of the first things that I got clear in my mind when I began to play around with fiction, that I had to find a language and it was not in existance at the time. You have put it very well - it wasn't to be taken for granted. You had to go on and search until you found a way through the conversation of English and Igbo. The two languages stuck into each other and tried to find a way to express through one, the medium of the thoughts. That's a very exciting thing to do, a very difficult thing to do.

  Chinua Achebe

  Taken, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• It is not quite true to say that I am not an advocate of writing in African languages. What I think is, one has to think about what is practicable.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Thinking, Language

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• Naming is like putting a stamp on something and fixing it. A kind of formaldehyde sort of fixation, but it becomes dead, sitting there forever, frozen. So, I'm not a great one for these modernist, post modernist, post colonial labels. I think they serve certain purpose. You do need some kind of sign post here and there, but it can also become an end in itself.

  Chinua Achebe

  Thinking, Forever, Here And There

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• If you were to loose the habit of making the effort to get the book and read the words one by one you would have lost something terribly important. So I think that we have a task to ensure that this doesn't happen.

  Chinua Achebe

  Book, Thinking, Effort

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• I do not think that there need be the conflict between books and videos, that one would drive out the other. It certainly is possible to watch the screen for some things and for others to sit down and read, because the screen is easier to do, to watch is easier than to read because you don't have to contemplate anything. Someone else has done the work of putting it on the video.

  Chinua Achebe

  Book, Thinking, Watches

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• We don't want to be simply wandering about without some kind of reason, we want our presence here to have a purpose, and that we are not going to end here, we are going to proceed somewhere else, and also that we didn't begin here, that we began somewhere else and all that living, all that elaborate account of our presence seems to be quite basic to our nature and so this is what literacy taps into.

  Chinua Achebe

  Somewhere Else, Purpose, Want

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• The market literature, which was particularly strong in Igboland, in Onitsha, today it is no longer strong. It is one of the victims of the civil war, that market was actually destroyed and at the end of the war a new Nigeria has struggled to come into being and I believe that what is probably going to replace the market literature might be the video, which they have taken to in a big way, creating dramas. So that may be the next thing way we will see coming out of the local basic level in our society.

  Chinua Achebe

  Strong, War, Drama

• For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.

  Chinua Achebe

  Reading, Writing, People

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• I'm sure if one turned one's mind back from grandiose faults to what is happening to the average man or woman or child in the rural areas, we will probably find that's where the energy for development is.

  Chinua Achebe

  Children, Men, Average

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• The rural areas have been deprived by the cities in the past. Development resources and energy should be directed where the people live.

  Chinua Achebe

  Past, Cities, People

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• I think not just Nigeria but I think the whole of Africa has to turn back to the rural areas and that's where the majority of the citizens are and that's where the engine of of development has to be found.

  Chinua Achebe

  Thinking, Majority, Citizens

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• In Nigeria, there is energy, whether it is Lagos, which is sheer anarchy, but it is not lethargic. It is strong, even aggressive and if that energy could be directed to work it will produce really enormous results.

  Chinua Achebe

  Strong, Energy, Anarchy

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• What has happened to Africa is very severe. We are talking about the collapse of this and the collapse of that, of good government, of the economy particularly. And this has hit education badly. The news you get from the universities in Nigeria is often appalling. I don't think a lot of it gets out. There is the obsession with cults and all kinds of dreadful things going on and all this is taking its toll and it is not surprising that quality of students and graduates who come out is not good. It will not be surprising if this shows in the quality of work they do.

  Chinua Achebe

  Thinking, Government, Talking

• There are people who say that if you are told that your house has fallen you don't ask what about the ceiling or what about the windows. The main thing is that this house, Africa, has fallen. Literature is just one aspect, pick any aspect of the situation.

  Chinua Achebe

  People, House, Ceilings

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• Children are very fair minded, they really are.

  Chinua Achebe

  Children, Fairs

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• Art is created to make us, to make our passage through the world better, fruitful - and I would say that every story in the end, if it is good, tells us something. This is actually what I meant when I said a novelist is a teacher. Which is why I am constantly dealing with "didactic". Now a teacher in the sense I use it is not somebody who has the profession of standing in front of children, with a piece of chalk in his hand scribbling on the blackboard. That is not the teacher I have in mind. The teacher I have in mind is something less tangible.

  Chinua Achebe

  Teacher, Art, Children

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• I do not actually see how art, literature can be anything other that being in that domain of trying to tell us, trying to get us to see what is important in our lives.

  Chinua Achebe

  Art, Trying, Important

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• I couldn't tell you why but now I know a story is in fact where you discover who you are, where a culture discovers what it is and I just think that this is a terribly important place to get into and that I would enjoy it.

  Chinua Achebe

  Thinking, Important, Facts

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• I did not think of writing as a career and I don't think that I did this ever really, but I think of writing as something that I could do, I should do alongside whatever else I was doing. It simply grew on me.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Thinking, Careers

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• I think as you grow up and you see things which are around you and you ask questions and you hear the answers, your situation becomes more and more of a puzzle. Now, why is it like this, why are things like this and since writing is one way in which one can ask this questions and try to find these answers, it seems to me a very natural thing to do, especially as it meant stories which I always found moving, almost unbearably necessary.

  Chinua Achebe

  Growing Up, Moving, Writing

• If I say look unless you change your leaders I will not give you any aid, you are likely to have people who say: "To the hell with you, we will struggle on the way but we will do it". Therefore what I am saying is - and I do not whether it is coming through clearly - there has to be a lot of care exercised by the people who are in the position to give or withhold assistance: if they start throwing their weight around, using extreme language, seeming to order other nations to do their bidding, then there will not be a good result, it will not be done.

  Chinua Achebe

  Struggle, Order, Giving

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• If the economy of a country collapses completely and the hospitals are no longer able to function as hospitals, it will be very difficult to tell every doctor to stay home to work without drugs, to work without equipment. You might tell some to stay but there a lot of young people who are at the beginning of their careers who would be very difficult to persuade.

  Chinua Achebe

  Country, Home, Doctors

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• I think the language that we use in dealing with one another is very important. And even if I am called upon to bring out some money to support a regime, and I am entitled to say I do not like what that regime does and obviously I am not going to put money there - you cannot really say this is wrong or this is unreasonable.

  Chinua Achebe

  Thinking, Support, Important

• I think Africa is slowly learning - and painfully - that importance of insisting on responsible leadership. It will come eventually, and we may be impatient and rightly so, because it is not coming fast enough. But that is the way to go.

  Chinua Achebe

  Thinking, May, Way

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• Those who are talking sharia in Nigeria are really just politicians exploiting what they think is available. But if it should turn out that there are in fact whole sections of the country which believe that it is legitimate to chop off peoples hands because they stole a hen - if that should really turn out to be the genuine belief of responsible, educated people in the North than I would say there is no chance. But I do not believe that is the case. The sharia was always there but it was never force onto non-Muslims and it was not ever applied in the area of criminal law.

  Chinua Achebe

  Country, Believe, Thinking