Quote

I tend to work best as a one-man Task Force, including even the roles of messenger, coffee maker and office cleaner.

Wole Soyinka

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Men
Tend
Cleaner
Including
Cleaners
Office
Messengers
Roles
Maker
Force
Makers
Best
Task
Even
Coffee
Work
Tasks
Messenger

More quotes by Wole Soyinka

Image
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
Image
And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.
Wole Soyinka
Image
Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole Soyinka
Image
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
Image
Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
Wole Soyinka
Image
African film makers are scraping by on a mere pittance.
Wole Soyinka
Image
Next to the commodities of corruption, and religion, however, Nigeria is the world capital of rumour mongering.
Wole Soyinka
Image
My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
Wole Soyinka
Image
Culture is a matrix of infinite possibilities and choices. From within the same culture matrix we can extract arguments and strategies for the degradation and ennoblement of our species, for its enslavement or liberation, for the suppression of its productive potential or its enhancement.
Wole Soyinka
Image
Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it.
Wole Soyinka
Image
I said: A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces. In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: I am a tiger. When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.
Wole Soyinka
Image
After the death of the sadistic dictator Gen. Sanni Abacha in 1998, Nigeria underwent a one-year transitional military administration headed by Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, who uncharacteristically bowed out precisely on the promised date for military disengagement. Did the military truly disengage, however? No.
Wole Soyinka
Image
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
Image
Society itself is responsible for the degradation.
Wole Soyinka
Image
I am disturbed for instance when I read that a candidate said, 'I will not probe anybody or something like that'. You don't fight corruption by sweeping everything under the carpet, you don't.
Wole Soyinka
Image
It is not fair to those who fight corruption that they have to fight the aggressiveness, the impunity of the corrupt.
Wole Soyinka
Image
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
Image
The Egba kingdom was one of the very last to be ceded to the British protectorate. It remained almost an independent entity within what is now known as Nigeria, simply because of its own traditional structure of governance.
Wole Soyinka
Image
Writers - human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.
Wole Soyinka
Image
Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.
Wole Soyinka