Top 100 Wole Soyinka Quotes
#1. I like my peace and quiet whenever I can grab it.
Wole Soyinka
#2. Let's say there are prospects for a new Nigeria, but I don't think we have a new Nigeria yet.
Wole Soyinka
#3. As far as the regime is concerned, well, the play is sheer terror for them. Because they feel, How dare - how dare anybody lift his or her voice in criticism against us? We have the guns. Their level of paranoia and power-drunkenness is unbelievable.
Wole Soyinka
#4. 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
#5. Each time I think I've created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.
Wole Soyinka
#6. There's a kind of dynamic quality about theater and that dynamic quality expresses itself in relation to, first of all, the environment in which it's being staged; then the audience, the nature of the audience, the quality of the audience.
Wole Soyinka
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I don't know any other way to live but to wake up every day armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me.
Wole Soyinka
#11. I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don't function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I'm even ready to write.
Wole Soyinka
#12. And gradually they're beginning to recognize the fact that there's nothing more secure than a democratic, accountable, and participatory form of government. But it's sunk in only theoretically, it has not yet sunk in completely in practical terms.
Wole Soyinka
#13. Writers and intellectuals have a duty to humanity. It is to insist that the human entity remains the primary asset in overall development; thus, it must be safeguarded.
Wole Soyinka
#14. For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity.
Wole Soyinka
#15. Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
Wole Soyinka
#17. A tiger does not shout its tigritude, it acts.
Wole Soyinka
#18. 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
#19. I love beauty. But I like the beauty accidentally, not dished up, served up on a platter.
Wole Soyinka
#20. It's the place to begin, always
to return to home, literally.
Wole Soyinka
#21. In the world of literature, I see prizes as more of a duty to the craft itself, rather than as something for the individual.
Wole Soyinka
#22. I cannot belong to a nation which permits such barbarities as stoning to death and amputation - I don't care what religion it is.
Wole Soyinka
#23. I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we'd never smelled the fumes of petroleum.
Wole Soyinka
#25. The Lagos of my childhood was a well-laid-out maritime city.
Wole Soyinka
#26. Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress the truth.
Wole Soyinka
#27. I don't have the sort of temperament that submits to Christianity or Islam.
Wole Soyinka
#28. Some people think the Nobel Prize makes you bullet-proof. I never had that illusion.
Wole Soyinka
#29. The writer is the visionary of his people ... He anticipates, he warns.
Wole Soyinka
#30. I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
Wole Soyinka
#31. Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.
Wole Soyinka
#32. 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
#33. The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny
Wole Soyinka
#34. I'm an Afro-realist. I take what comes, and I do my best to affect what is unacceptable in society.
Wole Soyinka
#35. Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.
Wole Soyinka
#36. Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centered squarely on the ownership of land.
Wole Soyinka
#37. The Sudanese government has been playing games with the world, with the Africa Union, in particular, have been playing for time in order to conclude its mission of ethnic cleansing in the Sudan.
Wole Soyinka
#38. My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience. I never know who's influencing me at any time.
Wole Soyinka
#39. The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
Wole Soyinka
#40. 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
#41. An idyllic period of my existence was when I had a den attached to my home ... a writing den, and no one had access to that unless they had their own special visa, applied for weeks in advance.
Wole Soyinka
#42. I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.
Wole Soyinka
#43. Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole Soyinka
#44. 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 happens in Darfur becomes an assault on my own community, and on me as an individual. That's what the human family is all about.
Wole Soyinka
#45. 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
#46. Seven is the magic figure, because that's a symbolic figure of my favorite deity, Ogun.
Wole Soyinka
#47. 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
#48. Romance is the sweetening of the soul
With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.
Wole Soyinka
#49. I found, when I left, that there were others who felt the same way. We'd meet, they'd come and seek me out, we'd talk about the future. And I found that their depression and pessimism was every bit as acute as mine.
Wole Soyinka
#50. No writer has a right to make that much money. Indeed, without diabolical assistance, no writer can.
Wole Soyinka
#51. Well, the first thing is that truth and power for me form an antithesis, an antagonism, which will hardly ever be resolved. I can define in fact, can simplify the history of human society, the evolution of human society, as a contest between power and freedom.
Wole Soyinka
#52. Suddenly the world has run amok and left you alone and sane behind
Wole Soyinka
#53. The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices.
Wole Soyinka
#54. Politics, I believe, is a full-time occupation.
Wole Soyinka
#55. For now, let us simply observe that the assault on human dignity is one of the prime goals of the visitation of fear, a prelude to the domination of the mind and the triumph of power
Wole Soyinka
#57. For the fire consumes all but the arsonist.
Wole Soyinka
#58. I ceased using words like optimism and pessimism a long time ago.
Wole Soyinka
#59. Education is lacking in most of those who pontificate.
Wole Soyinka
#60. If man cannot, what god dare claim perfection?
Wole Soyinka
#61. There's no way to escape the culture that has evolved, from which we ourselves have evolved. Naturally, we stress it, break it up, reassemble it to suit our own needs. But it is there - a source of vital strength.
Wole Soyinka
#62. All religions accept that there is something called 'criminality.' And criminality cannot be excused by religious fervour.
Wole Soyinka
#63. The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice.
Wole Soyinka
#64. Probably to me the greatest singer, female voice, is Billie Holiday. And one of the most moving for me, I don't know why - maybe it's nostalgia, maybe because my life is one of constant partying, whatever.
Wole Soyinka
#65. I've always written plays for the purpose of getting something out of my system.
Wole Soyinka
#66. Today, the constituency of fear has become much broader, far less selective
Wole Soyinka
#67. Some African leaders actually dare to suggest that democracy is a concept alien to traditional African society. This is one of the most impudent political blasphemies I can think of.
Wole Soyinka
#68. Before you're a writer, you're a citizen, a human being, and therefore the weapons of the citizen are at your disposal to use or not use.
Wole Soyinka
#69. If you believe in democracy, are you not thereby obliged to accept, without discrimination, the fall-outs that come with a democratic choice, even if this means the termination of the democratic process itself?
Wole Soyinka
#70. I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture.
Wole Soyinka
#71. You go to conferences, and your fellow African intellectuals - and even heads of state - they all say: 'Nigeria is a big disappointment. It is the shame of the African continent.'
Wole Soyinka
#72. When I write plays, I'm already seeing the shapes on stage, of the actors and their interaction, and so on and so forth. I don't think I've ever written one play as an abstract piece, as a literary piece, floating in the air somewhere, to be flushed out later on.
Wole Soyinka
#73. But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That's all.
Wole Soyinka
#74. History teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accompany their righteous thirst for justice.
Wole Soyinka
#75. The scales of reckoning with mortality are never evenly weighted, alas, and thus it is on the shoulders of the living that the burden of justice must continue to rest.
Wole Soyinka
#76. We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.
Wole Soyinka
#77. 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
#78. No man beholds his mother's womb Yet who denies it's there? Coiled To the navel of the world is that Endless cord that links us all To the great Origin. If I lose my way. The trailing cord will bring me to the roots.
Wole Soyinka
#79. The man dies in all those that keep silent.
Wole Soyinka
#80. 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
#81. There's something about the theater which makes my fingertips tingle.
Wole Soyinka
#82. I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.
Wole Soyinka
#83. It's my duty to fight those who have chosen to belong to the party of death, those who say they receive their orders from God somewhere and believe they have a duty to set the world on fire to achieve their own salvation.
Wole Soyinka
#84. African film makers are scraping by on a mere pittance.
Wole Soyinka
#85. One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.
Wole Soyinka
#86. We do not ask the mountain's aid to crack a walnut.
Wole Soyinka
#87. The idea of having to make constant reference to politics is anathema to my calling as a writer.
Wole Soyinka
#88. One, a mass movement from within, which, as you know, is constantly being put down brutally but which, again, regroups and moves forward as is happening right now as we are speaking.
Wole Soyinka
#89. I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.
Wole Soyinka
#90. Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped.
Wole Soyinka
#91. Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.
Wole Soyinka
#92. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it.
Wole Soyinka
#93. A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment more than buildings: It must shatter the foundations of thought and re-create. Only in this way does every individual share in the cataclysm and understand the purpose of sacrifice.
Wole Soyinka
#94. I have one abiding religion-human liberty.
Wole Soyinka
#95. The Nation of Islam provides an antidote in the United States to fundamentalist Islam - which is why individuals from America have to go abroad to find radical teachings.
Wole Soyinka
#97. Human life has meaning only to that degree and as long as it is lived in the service of humanity.
Wole Soyinka
#99. Those nations that say it's a crime to preach your religion are making a terrible mistake. All they're doing is driving underground other forms of spiritual intuitions and practices.
Wole Soyinka
#100. And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.
Wole Soyinka
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
