Chinua Achebe

"Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him."

"Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness."

"I've had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the country because of difference in religion. These are things we should put behind us."

"In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out."

"My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don't see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity."

"People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience."

"The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience."

"The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it's a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high."

"The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic."

"When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day."

"When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt."