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Chinua Achebe Biography

Chinua Achebe (/ˈtʃɪnwɑː əˈtʃɛbɛ/, born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe; (16 November 1930 – 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), often considered his best, is the most widely read book in modern African literature. He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007.

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Chinua Achebe Quotes

In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.

Definition, Definitions, Protest, Restraint, Writer

It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.

Bestiality, Incompetence, Language, Purpose, Seriously, Use

I think Africa is slowly learning - and painfully - that importance of insisting on responsible leadership. It will come eventually, and we may be impatient and rightly so, because it is not coming fast enough. But that is the way to go.

Come, Insisting, May, Thinking, Way

If I say look unless you change your leaders I will not give you any aid, you are likely to have people who say: "To the hell with you, we will struggle on the way but we will do it". Therefore what I am saying is - and I do not whether it is coming through clearly - there has to be a lot of care exercised by the people who are in the position to give or withhold assistance: if they start throwing their weight around, using extreme language, seeming to order other nations to do their bidding, then there will not be a good result, it will not be done.

Aid, Language, Order, People, Struggle, Withhold

The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.

Dancing, Like, Stand, Want, World

I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.

Able, Carry, Communion, Home, Weight

Even the village rain-maker no longer claimed to be able to intervene. He could not stop the rain now, just as he would not attempt to start it in the heart of the dry season, without serious danger to his own health.

Heart, Intervene, Rain, Start, Village

Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.

Bag, Bags, Carrie, Carries, Man, Men

The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.

Experience, Learn, Learnt, Nothing, Thing, Thought Provoking

A goat does not eat into a hen's stomach no matter how friendly the two may be.

Doe, Eat, Friendly, Stomach, Two

I don't praise my people. I am their greatest critic.

Critic, Critics, Greatest, People, Praise

A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.

Making, Man, Men, Reality, Thought Provoking, Trouble

People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.

Confirm, Failing, Front, Fronts, People, See

Good leaders, competent leaders must see it as primary task to create friendliness. This something within the scope of most people. Now artists, like writers and sort of course have an added option of using their scale and talent with this in view. It is their business to create an environment in which our people will prosper and be happy.

Added, Artist, Friendliness, People, Views

A boy sent by his father to steal does not go stealthily but breaks the door with his feet.

Boys, Breaks, Doors, Father, Feet, Stealthily

She pouted her lips like a gun in my face.

Face, Faces, Gun, Like, Lips

Almost 30 years before Rwanda, before Darfur, more than 2 million people - mothers, children, babies, civilians - lost their lives as a result of the blatantly callous and unnecessary policies enacted by the leaders of the federal government of Nigeria. It's this charge that's dominated the book's Nigerian press, so far as I can see, the accusation, on the one hand, that Awolowo hatched "a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation - eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.

Baby, Children, Hand, Mother, Result, Unnecessary

A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.

Gets, Man, Men, Thought Provoking, Unsay, Yesterday

I try as hard as possible not to be pessimistic because I have never thought or believed that creating a Nigerian nation would be easy; I have always known that it was going to be a very tough job. But I never really thought that it would be this tough. And what's going on now, which is a subjection of this potentially great country to a clique of military adventurers and a political class that they have completely corrupted - this is really quite appalling. The suffering that they have unleashed on millions of people is quite intolerable.

Class, Country, Jobs, Military, Millions, Subjection

A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing

Daytime, Doe, Run, Running, Toad, Toads

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