Wole Soyinka

Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.

Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.

A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment more than buildings: It must shatter the foundations of thought and re-create. Only in this way does every individual share in the cataclysm and understand the purpose of sacrifice.

Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.

I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.

Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.

I'm an Afro-realist. I take what comes, and I do my best to affect what is unacceptable in society.

For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity.

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.

Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for.

There are different kinds of artists and very often, I'll be very frank with you, I wish I were a different kind.

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

Some African leaders actually dare to suggest that democracy is a concept alien to traditional African society. This is one of the most impudent political blasphemies I can think of.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centered squarely on the ownership of land.

I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture.

All religions accept that there is something called 'criminality.' And criminality cannot be excused by religious fervour.

Each time I think I've created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.

See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.