Chinua Achebe Quotes

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

Nobody told me how to talk or think.

Don't ever let anyone else write your story for you.

...I can write my own stories and I can write myself in.

If you don't like someone's story, write your own.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.

I'm free. I'm free to say what I feel.

So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story.

Saying what we think gives a wider range of conversation than saying what we know.

It's really important to stand up for yourself and not always agree with what people say if indeed you don't feel that that's true.

If you don't accept there is a problem, then it is hard to debate things.

The very essence of modern life is the opportunity for people everywhere to speak, hear, persuade, change their minds, know what others are thinking, and think for themselves.

Writing gave me the world.

I think it's important to have conversation about things instead of shutting things down.

If you don't like what someone has to say, argue with them.

Writing is a form of activism.

I spend a lot of time bathing in a glow of consensus but you also have to be willing to say something to people who might not agree with you and take the consequences of what follows.

Write your own stories.

I like to sit and talk to someone, and if they want to write about it, OK. But when it's a chore, I have a choice. There's a choice for all of us, including me.

That's what art is about: to create dialogue. Everybody deserves to have their own opinion.

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.

Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.