You Quotes by Wole Soyinka

9 You quotes by Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka pens nine lyrical reflections on “You,” each line resonating with his literary gravitas. The collection reads like a compact anthology, inviting readers to contemplate the self through poetic nuance.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

Military dictatorship, you can focus on it, you can fight it directly. It's a band of power-driven people.

Wole Soyinka

Image

Before you're a writer, you're a citizen, a human being, and therefore the weapons of the citizen are at your disposal to…

Wole Soyinka

Image

Some people think the Nobel Prize makes you bullet-proof. I never had that illusion.

Wole Soyinka

Image

You always assume for some strange reason that you need three meals a day.

Wole Soyinka

Image

My father was a schoolteacher, and so I had the advantage of both western educational instruction in the school, as well as…

Wole Soyinka

Image

Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of…

Wole Soyinka

Image

One has a responsibility to clean up one's space and make it livable as far as one's own resources go. That includes…

Wole Soyinka

Image

You go to conferences, and your fellow African intellectuals - and even heads of state - they all say: 'Nigeria is a…

Wole Soyinka

Image

There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other people. I'm talking about a…

Wole Soyinka

Image

Other authors on You

More by Wole Soyinka

Writers and intellectuals have a duty to humanity. It is to insist that the human entity remains the primary asset in overall development; thus,…

Wole Soyinka

Image

When I tried to create a new political party, which I stressed that this is not my party. I believe very much that there…

Wole Soyinka

Image

Each time I think I've created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.

Wole Soyinka

Image

I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art…

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…

Wole Soyinka

Image

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

Image

The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices.

Wole Soyinka

Image

One, a mass movement from within, which, as you know, is constantly being put down brutally but which, again, regroups and moves forward as…

Wole Soyinka

Image

One has to confront history honestly.

Wole Soyinka

Image

We wasted a lot of creative energy in that immediate post colonial era, when there was a struggle between, you know, the Cold War…

Wole Soyinka

Image

I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.

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…

Wole Soyinka

Image

One's own self-worth is tied to the worth of the community to which one belongs, which is intimately connected to humanity in general. What…

Wole Soyinka

Image

I was born into a Christian household, in a parsonage in fact, so I grew up in sort of a missionary atmosphere but it…

Wole Soyinka

Image

The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not…

Wole Soyinka

Image