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 who...

I’ve had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the country because of difference in religion. These are things we should put behind us.

Many writers can’t make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don’t really know about its value to the student. I don’t mean it’s useless....

Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.

I feel that there has to be a purpose to what we do. If there was no hope at all, we should just sleep or drink and wait for death. But we don’t want to...

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