When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right...

A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.

People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them. This is what people have come to expect. It’s...

A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness

The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic.

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not...

The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity – that it’s this or maybe that – you have just one large statement; it...

I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.

The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.

What’s important is that we recognize the falsehood of the notion that the Third World should be abandoned because it’s a waste of time.

While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.

They have not always elected the best leaders, particularly after a long period in which they have not used this facility of free election. You tend to lose the habit.

Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.

The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this...

The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it’s a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level...

Nigera is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.

Nigerians are what they are because their leaders are not what they should be

As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look.

I don’t care about age very much. I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.

I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. That’s different from prescribing a way in which a writer should...

Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way...

The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don’t always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!

It is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors.

Unoka went into an inner room and soon returned with a small wooden disc containing a kola nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk. “I have kola,” he announced when he sat...

Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

I’m a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I...

Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.

Oh, the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don’t expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow...

If we have any role at all, I think it’s the role of optimism, not blind or stupid optimism, but the kind which is meaningful, one that is rather close to that notion of the...

At the most one could say that his chi or … personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said...

My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different...

What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens – whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don’t then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground...

Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.

The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with...

I tell my students, it’s not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What’s more difficult is to identify with someone you don’t see, who’s very far away,...

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.

People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

There’s no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are...

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

I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

…she was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies...

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it’s far removed from your situation. This is...

Each of my books is different. Deliberately… I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that’s the time to do something about it, not when it’s around your neck.

Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest.