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A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing
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
Toad
Toads
Daytime
Running
Doe
Nothing
More quotes by Chinua Achebe
A good leader for instance is somebody like Nelson Mandela. I do not have seen such people coming every generation, maybe every ten generations, every hundred generations. People who are miracle workers.
Chinua Achebe
Do not be in a hurry to rush into the pleasures of the world like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come.
Chinua Achebe
Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.
Chinua Achebe
What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.
Chinua Achebe
I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.
Chinua Achebe
The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.
Chinua Achebe
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
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
My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.
Chinua Achebe
Africa is people may seem too simple and too obvious to some of us. But I have found in the course of my travels through the world that the most simple things can still givwe us a lot of trouble, even the brightest among us: this is particularly so in matters concerning Africa.
Chinua Achebe
Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes.
Chinua Achebe
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
After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.
Chinua Achebe
I prefer to go on trying all kinds of things, not to be told, This is the way it is done.
Chinua Achebe
People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.
Chinua Achebe
...Nothing puzzles God
Chinua Achebe
I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.
Chinua Achebe
Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.
Chinua Achebe
Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.
Chinua Achebe
Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.
Chinua Achebe
