One has a responsibility to clean up one's space and make it livable as far as one's own resources go. That includes not only material resources, but psychological resources: the commitment of time and a portion of your mind to something when you'd rather be doing something else.


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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Each time I think I've created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private sp...
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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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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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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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You cannot live a normal existence if you haven't taken care of a problem that affects your life...
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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.
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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.
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I like my peace and quiet whenever I can grab it.
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The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
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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.
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See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet com...
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Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centered squarely on the own...
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A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment ...
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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.
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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 ...
WOLE SOYINKA
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.
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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.
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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.
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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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