Top 25 African Writer Quotes
#1. Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
Ben Okri
#2. Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.
Henning Mankell
#3. I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.
Dinaw Mengestu
#4. There is no living African writer who has not had to, or will not have to, contend with Achebe's work. We are either resisting him - stylistically, politically, or culturally - or we are writing toward him.
Chris Abani
#5. Oh, I love labels, as long as they are numerous. I'm an American writer. I'm a Nigerian writer. I'm a Nigerian American writer. I'm an African writer. I'm a Yoruba writer. I'm an African American writer.
Teju Cole
#6. I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.
Taiye Selasi
#7. F me," I say loudly and everyone looks at me.
"Can I help you?" the tour guide asks in an icy tone.
I shake my head, noticing Callie is staring at me. "Sorry man, I thought a bee landed on me.
Jessica Sorensen
#8. I don't live my life as a writer. I'm a mother, an African-American woman, and I do everything that everybody else does - cook and a little bit of cleaning.
Terry McMillan
#9. Love can give you the most exhilarating wonderful highs at times ...
... Then there will be dives that will take all you have just to hold on ...
Quote on the Title Page of Love TORN Asunder
Elizabeth Funderbirk
#10. My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ.
Colossians 2 2
Anonymous
#12. Plot springs from character ... I've always sort of believed that these people inside me- these characters- know who they are and what they're about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don't type.
Anne Lamott
#13. Whoever imitates a people is one of them.
Abu Dawood
#15. Joinville's perspective shifts vertically, depending on whether he has fallen from his horse or just remounted.
Umberto Eco
#16. When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.
Connie Willis
#18. Because books saved my life, literally, I've become close to them
Malebo Sephodi
#19. Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we all got along. If there were no terrorism, Islamophobia, Western hypocrisy, corrupt government in African countries (especially Liberia), sexism, nativism, people like Donald Trump, stereotypes, war, Capitalism, Communism, Marxism and xenophobia.
Henry Johnson Jr
#20. As far as I'm concerned the last good man went when Elvis died.
Jennifer Crusie
#21. African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.
Chris Abani
#22. People in power will lie to keep it. Honesty doesn't make you less human.
Henry Johnson Jr
#23. How much deeper would the ocean be if sponges didn't live there?
Steven Wright
#24. Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard's African novels.
Wilbur Smith
#25. I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.
William Golding
