Nigerian writer (1930-2013)
It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Afrique, 1962
A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Arrow of God
The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.
CHINUA ACHEBE
The Education of a British-Protected Child
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
Only half-wits can stumble into such enormities.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
She pouted her lips like a gun in my face.
CHINUA ACHEBE
"Misunderstanding", Collected Poems
No Madonna and Child could touch
Her tenderness for a son
She soon would have to forget....
The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,
Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs
And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps
Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there
Had long ceased to care, but not this one:
She held a ghost-smile between her teeth,
And in her eyes the memory
Of a mother's pride...
CHINUA ACHEBE
"A Mother in a Refugee Camp", Collected Poems
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Sunday Nation, Jan. 15, 1967
A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
I have so many ideas; there are so many things that need to be done, so many possibilities, you know; one is terribly excited, but at the same time, you're almost confused, because you don't know where to begin.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Okike, 1990
Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
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 audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
But oh what beauty! What speed!
A chariot of night in panic flight
From Our Royal Proclamation of the rites
Of day! And riding out Our procession
Of fantasy We slaked an ancient
Vestigial greed shriveled by ages of dormancy
Till the eyes exhausted by glorious pageantries
Returned to rest on that puny
Legend of the life-jacket stowed away
Of all places under my seat.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Things Fall Apart
The books are, in fact, the story of the country of my birth, Ogidi, in eastern Nigeria. In the first, I tell of the village traditions and the hopes and fears of all the inhabitants at the time when the first contacts with Europeans are taking place. In the second book, which is in fact the third of the trilogy, the story is about my generation. In the missing book, the story will be about my father's generation, those who were Christianized. The theme of it will be the conflict of the head priest with the rest of the village during the 1920's. But I can't write it yet, because I haven't yet got far enough back into the problems of that period. It is too easy to discredit the former generation. In reality, that generation is very important and I must still pay attention to it.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Afrique, 1962