Chinua Achebe Quotes

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.

I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

My mother had an incredibly strong accent - although I couldn't hear it - and she was the main person there, so I'll have learnt to speak English from her.

When I'm in the U.K. I find myself using a lot of Britishisms.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

I was always influenced by language.

As a writer, I've always been interested in others.

I think, in reading a few sentences of text, you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers but in lyricists as well.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.

We didn't create the culture of film. We certainly market it better than anyone in the world, but film could have happened anywhere. It's not distinctly American, as witnessed by the fact that there are film communities throughout the world that tell stories to their own cultural liking.

Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.

There's a perception that good writing is writing which runs smoothly. But smooth-running prose can work against what you're trying to express in a novel.

Will America be the death of English? I'm glad I asked me that. My well-thought-out mature judgment is that it will.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

The way that I see third person is it's actually first person. Writing for me is all voice work. Third person narrative is just as character-driven as first person narrative for me in terms of a voice. I don't write very much in third person.

I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

I never started writing because I wanted to write myself stuff. It was really more that I had these stories to tell, and I wanted to work with people that I respected and liked.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

The style developed over decades, really, but I started out writing pretty traditional stories, then became impatient. It was a writer named Russell Edson who showed me that one could write in any way at all.

And in spite of everything, Ireland remains the brain of the Kingdom. The English, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget--the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature.

What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.