Wole Soyinka Quotes About Literature

Quotes about: Literature

• In European and American society, many pundits started to lament the death of literature; looking at youth who were getting more and more attracted to sitcoms - hard, adventure films and said, our children are no longer reading, or else they're reading cartoons.

  Wole Soyinka

  Children, Reading, Adventure

  Source: whatsonafrica.org

• The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice. The proof of that is the ability of a dictator to snuff out the life of a writer.

  Wole Soyinka

  Writing, Doe, Literature

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

• Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive. One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it's hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other.

  Wole Soyinka

  Responsibility, Writing, Mean

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

• The very function of creativity, of the elaboration of the human condition only enlarges the human spirit and, I mean, as a writer I don't want to read political literature all the time. It would be terribly boring and, you know, abrasive, but just reading the insights, you know, partaking of the insights of a writer into phenomena, into society, into human relationships, both on a micro level and on a macro level, is already a function.

  Wole Soyinka

  Reading, Mean, Creativity

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

• I believe that prizes are useful things for the disciplines, whether we are talking about chemistry or we're talking... It motivates, it, you know, inspires, it encourages and it brings, in the case of literature, it brings literature, the arts out of the ghetto.

  Wole Soyinka

  Art, Believe, Ghetto

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

• Of course I've enjoyed having the Nobel Prize, the prestige that goes along with it, the money that came with it in particular. I was the typical, still am to some extent, impecunious writer, just struggling to make ends meet, so that, nobody's going to deny that at all. In fact, if they want to give it to me a second time, I'm standing by, ready to receive it, but it's a problem, it's a real problem and then expectations and then you have monsters like Sani Abacha who come up from time to time and who would have died a happy man if he'd succeeded in hanging a Nobel Laureate for literature.

  Wole Soyinka

  Real, Struggle, Men

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

• What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.

  Wole Soyinka

  Criticism, Literature, Helping

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

• Don't feel that you have to tailor your literature a particular way to please any school of ideology. There will emerge in its own right, effortlessly, some kind of ideological direction which is a reflection of your thinking and you want your thinking, above all.

  Wole Soyinka

  School, Thinking, Reflection

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

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