Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Wole Soyinka

Values

Care

Life

Related Quotes:

" I've always written plays for the purpose of getting something out of my system. "

" Just like birds, hunters know no borders. "

" But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That's all. "

" You go to conferences, and your fellow African intellectuals - and even heads of state - they all say: 'Nigeria is a big disappointment. It is the shame of the African continent.' "

" My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience. I never know who's influencing me at any time. "

Wole Soyinka

Process

Time

" There's a kind of dynamic quality about theater and that dynamic quality expresses itself in relation to, first of all, the environment in which it's being staged; then the audience, the nature of the audience, the quality of the audience. "

" The Sudanese government has been playing games with the world, with the Africa Union, in particular, have been playing for time in order to conclude its mission of ethnic cleansing in the Sudan. "

" Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves regimented by aliens from outer space. "

" Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth. "

" I don't know any other way to live but to wake up every day armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me. "

Wole Soyinka

Wake Up

Day

" I love beauty. But I like the beauty accidentally, not dished up, served up on a platter. "

Wole Soyinka

Served

Beauty

" There is not a special imposition on writers to be activists. All that does is encourage writers to write propaganda. Propaganda can be written by anybody, including dictators. "

" In the world of literature, I see prizes as more of a duty to the craft itself, rather than as something for the individual. "

" The writer is the visionary of his people... He anticipates, he warns. "

Wole Soyinka

Visionary

People

" I take friendship very seriously. "

" Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness. "

" The Nation of Islam provides an antidote in the United States to fundamentalist Islam - which is why individuals from America have to go abroad to find radical teachings. "

" The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism. "

" Before you're a writer, you're a citizen, a human being, and therefore the weapons of the citizen are at your disposal to use or not use. "

" Military dictatorship, you can focus on it, you can fight it directly. It's a band of power-driven people. "

" After the death of the sadistic dictator Gen. Sanni Abacha in 1998, Nigeria underwent a one-year transitional military administration headed by Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, who uncharacteristically bowed out precisely on the promised date for military disengagement. Did the military truly disengage, however? No. "

" The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices. "

" Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for. "

" I ceased using words like optimism and pessimism a long time ago. "

" Given the scale of trauma caused by the genocide, Rwanda has indicated that however thin the hope of a community can be, a hero always emerges. Although no one can dare claim that it is now a perfect state, and that no more work is needed, Rwanda has risen from the ashes as a model or truth and reconciliation. "

" 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. "

Wole Soyinka

Reading

Music

" One, a mass movement from within, which, as you know, is constantly being put down brutally but which, again, regroups and moves forward as is happening right now as we are speaking. "

" Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake. "

" I like to say, 'I spend one-third of my time in Nigeria, one-third in Europe or America, and one-third on a plane.' "

" For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity. "

Wole Soyinka

Condition

Humanity