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I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.
Wole Soyinka
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Wole Soyinka
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: July 13
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Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole Wole Soyinka
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More quotes by Wole Soyinka
Writers - human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.
Wole Soyinka
You cannot live a normal existence if you haven't taken care of a problem that affects your life and affects the lives of others, values that you hold which in fact define your very existence.
Wole Soyinka
Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.
Wole Soyinka
I am a very curious person I'll always ask: is this thing true, is it not true? And I use my own means to investigate and come to my conclusion.
Wole Soyinka
For many playwrights, they write the plays anyway because they've got to be, the work has been started, it's got to be finished, but we all long, I think, to see the plays fleshed out on stage and I'm exactly like that. Yes, I'm not satisfied until I actually see it on stage.
Wole Soyinka
But when you're deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it's amazing.
Wole Soyinka
I think most writers would like a quiet space, complete isolation, in which they control their own time. Spaces of creativity in which there's very little interruption.
Wole Soyinka
I tend to work best as a one-man Task Force, including even the roles of messenger, coffee maker and office cleaner.
Wole Soyinka
Sadly however, I discovered in one particular case that a colleague went and paid the bribe on my behalf, just to get our mission fulfilled. That was painful, and it strained our friendship.
Wole Soyinka
There's a lot of insincerity about the actions of our legislators they create distractions - like this anti-gay law you alluded to - and try to mobilise, to exacerbate people's emotions. Until the legislators started making laws, people minded, generally, their own business.
Wole Soyinka
I never hesitated, as a student, in embracing the necessity of violence. In South Africa, I didn't just accept it I looked forward to it as a mission.
Wole Soyinka
But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That's all.
Wole Soyinka
There is not a special imposition on writers to be activists. All that does is encourage writers to write propaganda.
Wole Soyinka
Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves regimented by aliens from outer-space.
Wole Soyinka
Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for.
Wole Soyinka
I do not believe that it is necessarily the duty of the writer to give a voice to his community. If a writer is true to his vocation, to his or her vocation, the very process of creativity enlarges these human horizons. It provides insights, even when you're not writing, when your writing's not dealing with a concrete political situation.
Wole Soyinka
I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals I was involved in school plays I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
Wole Soyinka
Intolerance has always been with us, you know. The moment you have ideology, we have intolerance, whether it's the secular ideology or, you know ideocratic ideology, which always brings with it some kind of intolerance.
Wole Soyinka
I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.
Wole Soyinka
History teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accompany their righteous thirst for justice.
Wole Soyinka
