Quotes About Chinua Achebe

Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.

My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet.

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.

When I was in England, I had seen advertisements about typing agencies; I had learned that if you really want to make a good impression, you should have your manuscript well typed.

It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair.

In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.

Onye nkuzi ewelu itali piagbusie umuaka. One of the ways an emphasis is laid in Ibo is by exaggeration, so that the teacher in the refrain might not actually have flogged the children to death.

It began to dawn on me that although fiction was undoubtedly fictitious it could also be true or false, not with the truth or falsehood of a news item but as to its disinterestedness, its intention, its integrity.

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

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

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.