Chinua Achebe Quotes

122 Sourced Quotes

To the question of writing at all we have sometimes been counselled to forget it, or rather the writing of books. What is required, we are told, is plays and films. Books are out of date! The book is dead, long live television! One question which is not even raised let alone considered is: Who will write the drama and film scripts when the generation that can read and write has been used up?

Chinua Achebe
Belief in superior and inferior races; belief that some people who live across our frontiers or speak a different language from ourselves are the cause of all the trouble in the world, or that our own particular group or class or caste has a right to certain things which are denied to others; the belief that men are superior to women, and so on—are all fictions generated by the imagination.

Chinua Achebe
A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.

Chinua Achebe
The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.

Chinua Achebe
The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.

Chinua Achebe
If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?

Chinua Achebe
There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.

Chinua Achebe
The Igbo people say, If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place.

Chinua Achebe
A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.

Chinua Achebe
When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.

Chinua Achebe
Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.

Chinua Achebe
The psychology of the dispossessed can be truly frightening.

Chinua Achebe
It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.

Chinua Achebe
I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.

Chinua Achebe
In America there is really very little knowledge of the literature of the rest of the world. Of the literature of Latin America, yes, But that's not all that different in inspiration from that of America, or of Europe. One must go further. You don't even have to go too far in terms of geography - you can start with the Native Americans and listen to their poetry.

Chinua Achebe
Do not be in a hurry to rush into the pleasures of the world like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come.

Chinua Achebe
When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth

Chinua Achebe
The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.

Chinua Achebe
Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.

Chinua Achebe
The singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world.

Chinua Achebe
When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.

Chinua Achebe
As a rule I don't like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.

Chinua Achebe
This is not pessimism but rather casting a cold eye on things. It is only one man's story, and I think that things will go better, but difficulties exist and nothing is served by hiding them under a poetic veil or under a lyricism of the past. I am against slogans.

Chinua Achebe
We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.

Chinua Achebe
If you had been poor in your last life I would have asked you to be rich when you come again. But you were rich. If you had been a coward, I would have asked you to bring courage. But you were a fearless warrior. If you had died young, I would have asked you to get life. But you lived long. So I shall ask you to come again the way you came before.

Chinua Achebe