Wole Soyinka
Wole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Babatunde Soyinkais a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honored in that category...
NationalityNigerian
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth13 July 1934
CityAbeokuta, Nigeria
CountryNigeria
people
Some people think the Nobel Prize makes you bullet-proof. I never had that illusion.
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I cannot belong to a nation which permits such barbarities as stoning to death and amputation - I don't care what religion it is.
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Military dictatorship, you can focus on it, you can fight it directly. It's a band of power-driven people.
magnetic situations
I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.
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I love beauty. But I like the beauty accidentally, not dished up, served up on a platter.
education lacking
Education is lacking in most of those who pontificate.
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Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
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The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.
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The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices.
fond
I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.
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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.
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Nigeria has had the misfortune - no, the fortune - of seeing the worst face of capitalism anywhere in Africa. The masses have seen it, they are disgusted, and they want an alternative.
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Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.
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I ceased using words like optimism and pessimism a long time ago.