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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
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole Wole Soyinka
Paper
Typewriter
Pieces
Bedtime
Learned
Typewriters
Morning
Machine
Start
Machines
Writing
Piece
Never
Writers
Understood

More quotes by Wole Soyinka

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When you fight corruption, corruption strikes back and that is the truth because when you fight corruption, you get confidence and when it gets to impunity, then it gets aggressive and says, 'oh, so you think you are different? You think you are tough and different?' This is why some of us are almost permanently in the libel court.
Wole Soyinka
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If I were sure I would pass the physicals, I would be on the next space shuttle to Mars or some other planet. I'll leave the calculations and the navigational tasks to you while I bask in your ingenuity. Find me a place in the capsule and watch me outdo Michael Jackson's moonwalk to the music of the spheres.
Wole Soyinka
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Alfred Nobel regretted that his invention, dynamite, was converted to degrading use, hence his creation of the Nobel Prize, as the humanist counter to the destructive power of his genius.
Wole Soyinka
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We live in the real world - we live within a certain history of the plague that has landed on us.
Wole Soyinka
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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
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Arts and the Sciences are a natural symbiosis. They stem from the same human existential impulse - exploration. Exploration of what lies beneath the surface, and re-confuguration of elements of what we call reality.
Wole Soyinka
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A human feast is an indifferent morsel to a god.
Wole Soyinka
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Suddenly the world has run amok and left you alone and sane behind
Wole Soyinka
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My mind immediately shot to South Africa the moment I sat down to think what I was going to write, what I was going to say. There was no other choice.
Wole Soyinka
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Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself.
Wole Soyinka
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I believe that prizes are useful things for the disciplines, whether we are talking about chemistry or we're talking... It motivates, it, you know, inspires, it encourages and it brings, in the case of literature, it brings literature, the arts out of the ghetto.
Wole Soyinka
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Next to the commodities of corruption, and religion, however, Nigeria is the world capital of rumour mongering.
Wole Soyinka
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There is not a special imposition on writers to be activists. All that does is encourage writers to write propaganda.
Wole Soyinka
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Well, first of all I'll say that I come alive best in theater.
Wole Soyinka
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And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.
Wole Soyinka
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My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain point, I had a tendency to make up my own elementary variations on stories I had heard, or to invent totally new ones.
Wole Soyinka
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Society itself is responsible for the degradation.
Wole Soyinka
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There's something about the theater which makes my fingertips tingle.
Wole Soyinka
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The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
Wole Soyinka
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If you are corrupt and you have extra cash you are able to shut the mouth of your accuser and they will be silenced.
Wole Soyinka