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Art should be on the side of humanity.
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
Side
Humanity
Sides
Art
More quotes by Chinua Achebe
What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.
Chinua Achebe
I don't praise my people. I am their greatest critic.
Chinua Achebe
I believe in the complexity of the human story, and that there's no way you can tell that story in one way and say, 'this is it.' Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing ... this is the way I think the world's stories should be told: from many different perspectives.
Chinua Achebe
When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.
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
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 language of young men is pull down and destroy but an old man speaks of conciliation.
Chinua Achebe
When I think of the standing, the importance and the erudition of all these people who see nothing about racism in Heart of Darkness, I'm convinced that we must really be living in different worlds.
Chinua Achebe
What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.
Chinua Achebe
When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.
Chinua Achebe
Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.
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
If you're rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world's stories should be told - from many different perspectives.
Chinua Achebe
You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.
Chinua Achebe
A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk.
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
The world is large,” said Okonkwo. “I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.” “That cannot be,” said Machi. “You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.
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
The Novelist As Teacher”: “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.
Chinua Achebe
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