Chinua Achebe Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, People, Stories

  FaceBook post by Chinua Achebe from Jul 27, 2011

• If you don't like someone's story, write your own.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Thought Provoking, Stories

  FaceBook post by Chinua Achebe from Dec 26, 2010

• What really worries me is that those who are in positions of power are not really affected by what we are writing. In the moral dialogue you want to start, you really want to involve the leaders. People ask me: "Why were you so bold as to publish A Man of the People? How did you think the Government was going to take it? You didn't know there was going to be a coup?" I said rather flippantly that nobody was going to read it anyway, so I wasn't likely to be fired from my official position. It's a distressing thought that we cannot engage our leaders in the kind of moral debate we need.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Men, Thinking

  Chinua Achebe, Bernth Lindfors (1997). “Conversations with Chinua Achebe”, p.19, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• If you don't like someone's story, write your own. If you don't like what somebody says, say what it is you don't like.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Stories, Write Your Own

• Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Voice, Perspective

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “There Was a Country: A Memoir”, p.47, Penguin

• 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

  Running, Writing, Tired

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “There Was a Country: A Memoir”, p.50, Penguin

• I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write. That's my own taste. I prefer to stumble on it.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Taste, Teach

• When I'm writing, I really want to satisfy myself. I've got a story that I am working on and struggling with, and I want to tell it the most effective way I can. That's really what I struggle with. And the thought of who may be reading it may be there somewhere in the back of my mind - I'll never say it's not there because I don't know - but it's not really what I'm thinking about.

  Chinua Achebe

  Struggle, Reading, Writing

• 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.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Artist, Thinking

• If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?

  Chinua Achebe

  Country, Writing, Community

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays”, p.82, Anchor

• I think dialects should be left alone. People should write in whatever dialect they feel they want to write. In the fullness of time, these dialects will sort themselves out.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Thinking, People

• Every generation must find its mission and fulfill it, as Fanon said - or betray it. So it is not something that you can write up on the wall, saying this is what has to be done. Every generation has to discover what it needs to do.

  Chinua Achebe

  Wall, Writing, Generations

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• 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.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Somewhere Else, Numbers

• 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

  Writing, Quality, Crafts

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “There Was a Country: A Memoir”, p.51, Penguin

• 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.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Dialect, Want

• I did not think of writing as a career and I don't think that I did this ever really, but I think of writing as something that I could do, I should do alongside whatever else I was doing. It simply grew on me.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Thinking, Careers

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• 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

  Jobs, Book, Mean

  Chinua Achebe, Bernth Lindfors (1997). “Conversations with Chinua Achebe”, p.19, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Slave, Traders

• I think as you grow up and you see things which are around you and you ask questions and you hear the answers, your situation becomes more and more of a puzzle. Now, why is it like this, why are things like this and since writing is one way in which one can ask this questions and try to find these answers, it seems to me a very natural thing to do, especially as it meant stories which I always found moving, almost unbearably necessary.

  Chinua Achebe

  Growing Up, Moving, Writing

• To the question of writing at all we have sometimes been counselled to forget it, or rather the writing of books. What is required, we are told, is plays and films. Books are out of date! The book is dead, long live television! One question which is not even raised let alone considered is: Who will write the drama and film scripts when the generation that can read and write has been used up?

  Chinua Achebe

  Drama, Book, Writing

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays”, p.83, Anchor

• What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Life Is, Accepting

• For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.

  Chinua Achebe

  Reading, Writing, People

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• I am not an early-morning person; I don't like to get out of bed, and so I don't begin writing at five A.M., though some people, I hear, do. I write once my day has started. And I can work late into the night, also.

  Chinua Achebe

  Morning, Writing, Night

• It is not quite true to say that I am not an advocate of writing in African languages. What I think is, one has to think about what is practicable.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Thinking, Language

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a resonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: `The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.'

  Chinua Achebe

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Things Fall Apart ch. 1 (1958)

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