Chinua Achebe Quotes

All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.

When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

How could I make a little book, when I have seen enough to make a dozen large books?

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.

I gave up writing children's books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from 'Punch': as I have always wanted to escape. In vain.

Sometimes, so much of the difficulty is the question of 'What am I going to write about?' because the world is so vast.

If I had to write a novel, I'd start crying after three lines.

I'm not a poet. So the writing process is a difficult one for me.

There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -henceforth?- the subject to which you are condemned.

It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.

Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.

Usually if a scene's really hard to write, I just don't write it. Nothing's coming to mind.

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.

The story sometimes writes you into a corner.

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.

I don't know how to write a children's book.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

I'd always hoped to write the story as a novel, but there was a long period when the [Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries] movie was stalled and in confusion. I felt frustrated creatively, and just couldn't work on the Baby material till the movie was sorted out.

Two things happened. The creative side of my career was harmed. When I'd sit down and write under the influence of coke, the ratio of pages kept to pages thrown out declined drastically. But onstage, when rapping about a feeling I already owned, I would sometimes get a burst of eloquence.

I'm probably the most proud of "Mrs. Potato Head," because I had that idea in my head for so long, and I tried writing that song one time and I just couldn't tell the story the way I wanted to, and I couldn't figure it out.

Neil [Gaiman, creator of the comic Sandman, featuring the Amos-based character Delirium] believes that faeries have gone beyond cool. They've transcended cool. I just think alternate realities make you a good writer. If your work is any more than one dimension, you believe in faeries. I'm sure I'll start thinking now about all the people I know who don't believe, that I quite like. We can still go have a pint. Not the Chardonnay, though.

Though it's marvelously entertaining, and I had fantastic fun writing the book, it's not terribly easily, the material, and it's not all that familiar...although we think it is familiar. The processes of the wonderful narratives are very intricate. It's about the charm - the spellbinding charm - of ingenuity, and it's not so easy to remember the plots or the structure or even the names.