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I'm very primitive I write with a pen.
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
Primitive
Write
Writing
Pens
More quotes by 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
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
Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.
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
A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.
Chinua Achebe
What a man does not know is greater than he.
Chinua Achebe
Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.
Chinua Achebe
When a new saying gets to the land of empty men, they lose their heads over 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
[Would] a sensible man spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune put in his mouth?
Chinua Achebe
I am not an early-morning person I don't like to get out of bed, and so I don't begin writing at five A.M., though some people, I hear, do. I write once my day has started. And I can work late into the night, also.
Chinua Achebe
Oh, the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don't expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room.
Chinua Achebe
While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.
Chinua Achebe
The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.
Chinua Achebe
It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.
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
When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.
Chinua Achebe
It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live.
Chinua Achebe
When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.
Chinua Achebe
I think the language that we use in dealing with one another is very important. And even if I am called upon to bring out some money to support a regime, and I am entitled to say I do not like what that regime does and obviously I am not going to put money there - you cannot really say this is wrong or this is unreasonable.
Chinua Achebe