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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

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Chinua Achebe
Age: 82 †
Born: 1930
Born: November 16
Died: 2013
Died: March 22
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe
Would
Number
People
Novel
Wasteful
Huge
Novels
Numbers
Add
Else
Lack
Seems
Somewhere
America
Writers
Writing
Therefore

More quotes by Chinua Achebe

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Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That's not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.
Chinua Achebe
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Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig.
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If you were to loose the habit of making the effort to get the book and read the words one by one you would have lost something terribly important. So I think that we have a task to ensure that this doesn't happen.
Chinua Achebe
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Whenever I try to do anything on a typewriter, it's like having this machine between me and the words what comes out is not quite what would come out if I were scribbling.
Chinua Achebe
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Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
Chinua Achebe
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A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.
Chinua Achebe
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Mosquito [...] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. How much longer do you think you will live? she asked. You are already a skeleton. Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.
Chinua Achebe
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Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write.
Chinua Achebe
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Wisdom is like a goatskin bag every man carries his own.
Chinua Achebe
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I think once you have done all you can to a manuscript, let it find its way in the world.
Chinua Achebe
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No man however great is greater than his people
Chinua Achebe
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There is no story that is not true, [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.
Chinua Achebe
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An angry man is always a stupid man.
Chinua Achebe
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A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.
Chinua Achebe
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An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb
Chinua Achebe
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If a child washed his hands, he could eat with kings.
Chinua Achebe
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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
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When a new saying gets to the land of empty men, they lose their heads over it.
Chinua Achebe
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I'm amazed when I think about students today. They know from day one what they are going to be. We didn't. We just coasted. We just knew that things would work out.
Chinua Achebe
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It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.
Chinua Achebe