But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry. -Chinua Achebe Poetry
My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel. -Chinua Achebe Teacher
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. -Chinua Achebe History
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. -Chinua Achebe Religion
I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders. -Chinua Achebe Food
Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness. -Chinua Achebe Society
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. -Chinua Achebe History
The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse! -Chinua Achebe Government
I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry. -Chinua Achebe Poetry
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. -Chinua Achebe Space
I don't care about age very much. I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life. -Chinua Achebe Age
A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership. -Chinua Achebe Leadership
The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic. -Chinua Achebe Relationship
When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day. -Chinua Achebe Strength
Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively. -Chinua Achebe History
