Each time I think I've created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.


Wole Soyinka

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The blatant aggressiveness of theocracies I find distressing, because I grew up when Christians, Mus...
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The scales of reckoning with mortality are never evenly weighted, alas, and thus it is on the should...
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History teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accomp...
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I love beauty. But I like the beauty accidentally, not dished up, served up on a platter.
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I found, when I left, that there were others who felt the same way. We'd meet, they'd come a...
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A tiger does not shout its tigritude, it acts.
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I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wishe...
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My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to ...
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The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.
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Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that a...
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Looking at faces of people, one gets the feeling there's a lot of work to be done.
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The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, ...
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Nigeria has had the misfortune - no, the fortune - of seeing the worst face of capitalism anywhere i...
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I don't know any other way to live but to wake up every day armed with my convictions, not yield...
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Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves re...
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One has a responsibility to clean up one's space and make it livable as far as one's own res...
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You cannot live a normal existence if you haven't taken care of a problem that affects your life...
WOLE SOYINKA
Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
WOLE SOYINKA
Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how...
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There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoi...
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Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.
WOLE SOYINKA
Human life has meaning only to that degree and as long as it is lived in the service of humanity.
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The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.
WOLE SOYINKA
I like my peace and quiet whenever I can grab it.
WOLE SOYINKA
The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
WOLE SOYINKA
I am a glutton for tranquility.
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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 oth...
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Given the scale of trauma caused by the genocide, Rwanda has indicated that however thin the hope of...
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I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.
WOLE SOYINKA
See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet com...
WOLE SOYINKA
Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centered squarely on the own...
WOLE SOYINKA
The Sudanese government has been playing games with the world, with the Africa Union, in particular,...
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A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment ...
WOLE SOYINKA
One's own self-worth is tied to the worth of the community to which one belongs, which is intima...
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We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.
WOLE SOYINKA
But theater, because of its nature, both text, images, multimedia effects, has a wider base of commu...
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Well, the first thing is that truth and power for me form an antithesis, an antagonism, which will h...
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All religions accept that there is something called 'criminality.' And criminality cannot be...
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An idyllic period of my existence was when I had a den attached to my home... a writing den, and no ...
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After the death of the sadistic dictator Gen. Sanni Abacha in 1998, Nigeria underwent a one-year tra...
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No writer has a right to make that much money. Indeed, without diabolical assistance, no writer can.
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But when you're deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you ...
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Seven is the magic figure, because that's a symbolic figure of my favorite deity, Ogun.
WOLE SOYINKA
Probably to me the greatest singer, female voice, is Billie Holiday. And one of the most moving for ...
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England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions...
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[It] takes a jaundiced view of the much-vaunted glorious past of Africa. And I suppose since then I'...
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It's the place to begin, always -- to return to home, literally.
WOLE SOYINKA
Obasanjo has openly endorsed violence as a means of governance, embraced and empowered individuals w...
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There is not a special imposition on writers to be activists. All that does is encourage writers to ...
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My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a cert...
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Just like birds, hunters know no borders.
WOLE SOYINKA
Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me persona...
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I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.
WOLE SOYINKA
The Lagos of my childhood was a well-laid-out maritime city.
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A tiger doesn't proclaim his tigritude, he pounces
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Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for ...
WOLE SOYINKA
One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.
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There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other peopl...
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I've done a lot of guerrilla theater in my time.
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We are moving towards a total mockery of constitutionalism. The president has crossed the line of po...
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Obasanjo has acted sufficiently against the constitution to warrant his impeachment. There is more t...
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My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain...
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Suddenly the world has run amok and left you alone and sane behind
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an opportunity for Nigerian civic society, an opportunity for the Nigerian military, and an opportun...
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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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Writing in certain environments carries with it an occupational risk.
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I like to say, 'I spend one-third of my time in Nigeria, one-third in Europe or America, and one...
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We Nigerians must reclaim our sovereignty, our civic entitlements.
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The writer is the visionary of his people... He anticipates, he warns.
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African film makers are scraping by on a mere pittance.
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The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of soci...
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And gradually they're beginning to recognize the fact that there's nothing more secure than ...
WOLE SOYINKA
There's something about the theater which makes my fingertips tingle.
WOLE SOYINKA
There's a kind of dynamic quality about theater and that dynamic quality expresses itself in rel...
WOLE SOYINKA
I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and se...
WOLE SOYINKA
My father was a schoolteacher, and so I had the advantage of both western educational instruction in...
WOLE SOYINKA
Power, of course. The primitive fear of being controlled. It does not matter whether it is an invasi...
WOLE SOYINKA
the very least we can live with is an agreement that does not reduce us to slaves of imposition, but...
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