Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebewas a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apartwas considered his magnum opus, and is the most widely read book in modern African literature...
NationalityNigerian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 November 1930
CityOgidi, Nigeria
CountryNigeria
thinking citizens
I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens.
adequate fiction helping
And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.
puzzles
...Nothing puzzles God
writing thinking artist
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 write.
desire genocide treated
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.
ideas want ifs
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 was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.
space long people
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 of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.
writing somewhere-else numbers
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 so few people writing about somewhere else.
father past men
Ogbuef Ezedudu,who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men when they came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan. "It has not always been so," he said. "My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. but after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.
beautiful heart passion
But 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 side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.
jobs book writing
My books have done extremely well, I know. But I don't honestly feel much different from when I began to write. I still think we have a long way to go. I suppose my name means more in Nigeria today than it did five years ago. But I feel the job that literature should do in our community has not even started. It's not yet part of the life of the nation. We are still at the beginning. It's a big beginning, because now we are catching the next generation in the schools. When I was their age, I had nothing to read that had any relevance to my own environment.
brother flesh bones
A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.
baby lying men
You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.
men arms harvest
When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.