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For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.

Ama Ata Aidoo

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Ama Ata Aidoo
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 23
Author
Novelist
Poet
Politician
Writer
Christina Ama Aidoo
Corruption
Serve
Authoritarianism
Fight
Embarrass
Literature
Utilitarian
Fighting
Africans
Purpose
Understandable
Artist
Expose
Must
African

More quotes by Ama Ata Aidoo

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Things are working out... towards their dazzling conclusions.
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the best way to sharpen a knife is not to whet one side of it only. And neither can you solve a riddle by considering only one end of it.
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Ghana is like a lion without a head
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Its a sad moment, really, when parents first become a bit frightened of their children.
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The very old certainly do not go back on lunch remains but they do bite back at old conversational topics.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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Love is fine for singing about and love songs are good to listen to, sometimes even to dance to. But when we need food for our stomachs and clothes for our backs, love is nothing. Ah my lady, the last man any woman should think of marrying is the man she loves.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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People are worms, and even the God who created them is immensely bored with their antics.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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I've written poems about gifts. Life is inspirational sometimes it comes from the most unlikely places.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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Sometimes a word or an argument will trigger a poem.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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money-making is like a god possessing a priest. He never will leave you, until he has occupied you, wholly changed the order of your being, and seared you through and up and down. Then only would he eventually leave you, but nothing of you except an exhausted wreck, lying prone and wondering who are you.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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There are powerful forces undermining progress in Africa. But one must never underestimate the power of the people to bring about change.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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Once an interesting idea or theme occurs to me then I would want to write a poem about it. The rest, frankly, is not difficult.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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Once in a while I catch myself wondering whether I would have found the courage to write if I had not started to write when I was too young to know what was good for me.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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Soyinka's Death at Dawn, Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts, Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning and Wislawa Szymborska's Some People come to mind immediately. But there are plenty, plenty more that I enjoy.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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Humans, not places, make memories.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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No matter what anybody says, we can't have it all. Not if you are a woman. Not yet.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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They had always told me that I wrote like a man.
Ama Ata Aidoo
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O yes, everyone gets lonely some time or other. After all, if we look closer into ourselves, shall we not admit that the warmth from other people comes so sweet to us when it comes, because, we always carry with us the knowledge of the cold loneliness of death?
Ama Ata Aidoo
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Politicians are easy to attack, but frankly, we are all guilty of not meeting the needs of Africa's young people properly.
Ama Ata Aidoo