Chinua Achebe Quotes

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

The word processor is a better tool than a quill pen because you can do so much more with it, but on the other hand, what you have to say and how you say it is the ultimate determination.

The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.

A pen connects you to the paper. It definitely matters.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

The pen is very quick for getting stuff from your brain to the page. I can do hieroglyphics in the margin. There are days when I really enjoy the flow of ink. I mean, nice pen, ink straight on to the page.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?

I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I'm a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day.

I love to write.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

The keyboard is my journal.

Technology must remain a tool. It's a great tool, but technology is the pen to write the book. It's not the book. If you have a great pen, maybe you'll write faster or it will look better, but at the end, you have something to say, or you don't.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

Write what you love and love what you write.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

You have to let people express themselves in the way that they need to express themselves. You have to express yourself in any way possible, provided you're prepared to live with the consequences.

Whereas to write, all you need is paper and an idea, so I felt that writing might be my stepping stone.

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

Never be afraid of a cliché, if it expresses what you wish to say.

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

Art is communication.

What I am after, above all, is expression.