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The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.
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
Squarely
Nigeria
Failure
Leadership
Simply
Trouble
More quotes by Chinua Achebe
In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
Chinua Achebe
Those whose kernels were cracked by benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble.
Chinua Achebe
What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.
Chinua Achebe
The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.
Chinua Achebe
There must be areas in which a particular character does not represent you.
Chinua Achebe
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
Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.
Chinua Achebe
The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it's a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.
Chinua Achebe
I don't like to see mistakes on the typewriter. I like a perfect script. On the typewriter I will sometimes leave a phrase that is not right, not what I want, simply because to change it would be a bit messy.
Chinua Achebe
I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.
Chinua Achebe
When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.
Chinua Achebe
We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.
Chinua Achebe
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
Actually, I identify with all my characters, good and bad. I have to do that in order to make them genuine. I have to understand them even if I don't approve of them. Not completely - it's impossible complete identification is, in fact, not desirable.
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
The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.
Chinua Achebe
It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.
Chinua Achebe
...when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.
Chinua Achebe
Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.
Chinua Achebe
When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.
Chinua Achebe
