Chinua Achebe Quotes

My mentors in life are much older than me and have been through life. They can actually give me some sound advice on what I'm going through.

One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.

I just really love hanging out with really old people. They're the best dinner dates you could ever have. All that life experience and understanding.

A lot of people are frightened by old age - by being around people who are, basically, on their way out - but I'm fascinated by it. It's an amazing thing to be around someone who has had a life well lived.

I'm fascinated by people in their eighties and nineties. Especially those who are still creating and living in an interesting way. I am fascinated by them because they have so much to say now that they've lived for so long.

I like making films about old people because they are repositories of amazing stories that they tell well. And they're incredibly good telly.

The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality.

I'm an old man of 73, and I've been around a long time. If I don't know something by now, I probably never will.

It should be your parents and others in the community that you look up to. For me it was my grandmother, a great woman. She had wisdom and knowledge.

I worked at a nursing home though high school... There's a lost appreciation for a generation that has so much to tell us when we're so full of self-help books and doctors on TV.

I suppose I would like to find out more about my grandparents because I knew them when I was too young to grasp that they were interesting people. They were my grandparents, source of treats.

God has use for all the old people.

I learned in life from a very young age that I soaked in a lot more from people that I respected and could learn from rather than a textbook.

Los Macorinos are much older than I am so when you surround yourself with older people you realize they lived what we're living now. They live in a moment of peace because they don't have to prove anything anymore.

A lot of people say if they could go back in time they would not change anything. But, to be honest with you, I like it and I don't like it. I like the fact that all I went through as a youngster made me a great man, but just goin' through what I went through - I wouldn't wanna go through that again. I wouldn't wish that on nobody.

I've experienced a lot for someone my age that a lot of people will be able to relate to.

You can learn from everyone, the president or the cleaner. You need teachers in life, but they're not always school teachers or professors. You learn from ordinary people. You learn from travel, from just walking down the street.

To be old is to be part of a huge and ordinary multitude... the reason why old age was venerated in the past was because it was extraordinary.

In life, we all learn from everyone.

There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.

I don't know if it's that the scripts are evolving or just that I'm getting older, but the characters become more interesting as you get older because you've lived more life at different stages. You've loved; you've lost; you have more of that journey.

The old idea that you grow wiser as you get older, and you learn from your elders, is actually completely wrong.

Old people are often impatient, but for what?

My grandmother lived with us for a short time while I was a child. Old people tend to be slightly more eccentric - they can behave the way they want.

When I was a boy, my own dad told me in a smiling and wistful way that it's a wise man that knows his own father.