Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole SoyinkaRead
There are different kinds of artists and very often, I'll be very frank with you, I wish I were a different kind.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire to be a different type of artist, highlighting the diversity in artistic expression.
Wole Soyinka reflects on the various forms of artistry and candidly admits a desire to embody a different type of artist. This statement suggests that while he appreciates his own craft, he feels an admiration or yearning for the qualities or impact of other artistic personas, emphasizing the complexity and individuality inherent in artistic expression.
In practice
In a workshop for aspiring artists discussing the challenges of artistic identity.
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 a writer and, therefore, automatically a suspicious character.
I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.
After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction
Bach is the supreme genius of music... This man, who knows everything and feels everything, cannot write one note, however unimportant it may appear, which is anything but transcendent. He has reached the heart of every noble thought, and has done it in the most perfect way.
I don't remember not dancing. When I realized I was alive and these were my parents, and I could walk and talk, I could dance.
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
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