Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole SoyinkaRead
I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.
Interpretation
The development of ideas is as crucial as the act of writing itself.
Wole Soyinka emphasizes that the creative process, including the time spent thinking, planning, and developing ideas, is equally important as the physical act of writing. This highlights the value of preparation and contemplation in the creative journey, suggesting that great work is built on a foundation of thoughtful gestation.
In practice
Use this quote during a creative writing workshop to highlight the importance of idea development.
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.
And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.
There are some people who have been reading me for years, and they keep saying kind things about the writing. That's what you're writing for, to get people to respond to it.
The most important thing in writing is to have written. I can always fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank one.
It's so easy, as a writer, to get stuck in your own head, to live in the little worlds you create. To forget that there are people out there reading your work, people who may be deeply affected by what you do, that you are writing not just for yourself, but for them.
Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."
When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.