"The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit."
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Quote collection
Chinua Achebe quotes (page 11 of 15)
300 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A boy sent by his father to steal does not go stealthily but breaks the door with his feet."
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"I think once you have done all you can to a manuscript, let it find its way in the world."
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"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."
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"Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write."
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"A man to whom you do a favor will not understand if you say nothing, make no noise, just walk away. You may cause more trouble by refusing a bribe than by accepting it."
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"Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That's not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is."
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"If the clan did not exact punishment for an offense against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender. As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled all the others."
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"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."
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"If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect."
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"I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write. That's my own taste. I prefer to stumble on it."
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"Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked."
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"There must be areas in which a particular character does not represent you."
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"People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience."
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"Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict."
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"The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership."
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"Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves"
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"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."
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"Colonial rule means that power, initiative is taken away from you by somebody else who makes your decisions. If that goes on long enough, beyond one generation, then the habit of self-rule is forgotten. People are no longer able to realize what it means. To be dependant for a hundred years! And suddenly when this thing ends there is nobody who actually knows how to set about running the country."
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"What is modesty but inverted pride?"
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