African Writer Quotes

There is no living African writer who has not had to, or will not have to, contend with Achebe's work. We are either resisting him - stylistically, politically, or culturally - or we are writing toward him. ~ Chris Abani

Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians. ~ Ben Okri

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience. ~ Chinua Achebe

Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom. ~ Henning Mankell

Because books saved my life, literally, I've become close to them ~ Malebo Sephodi

If you're a writer, you don't serve genres. Genres serve you. Like, if you're writing a science fiction story set on a spaceship, you don't have to have someone thrown out an airlock. ~ Charlie Jane Anders

The 7 Practices of Exceptional Student Athletes is an excellent book for student athletes to understand what it takes to be successful. It covers all phases of life, and it is filled with wonderful wisdom. Illustrated by brilliant examples of very successful people, The 7 Practices of Exceptional Student Athletes forces student athletes to use their common sense as they work to achieve their goals. Raven Magwood is a very talented person and an extremely gifted writer. ~ Danny Ford

Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. Once I'd enter his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Something about that whole process of building the structure of that game turned into a real kind of lightbulb moment for me as a writer. ~ Naomi Novik

I think to be writer you have to enjoy being alone. I was a loner as a teenager and was always drawn to characters in books and films who were at the fringes. ~ Markus Zusak

You need to change yourself. The moment that you change yourself it is a gigantic step. And this is what I do. The book is much more important than the writer. ~ Paulo Coelho

Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied. ~ Sloane Crosley

Beautiful things such as an African wooden bird, strange things like a singing magnetic pig, and funny things like a solar-powered waving bear are all things that I adore. My vice is really things. It took me a while to understand this, but you can enjoy all these things without owning them. Even though this may sometimes seem quite hard to do, training yourself to enjoy only looking at things, instead of buying them, is very nice and also a good practice. You really can't take everything with you, so maybe it is better to not try to own it all. ~ Margareta Magnusson

When Marcus Garvey died in 1940, the role of the British Empire was already being challenged by India and the rising expectations of her African colonies. Marcus Garvey's avocation of African redemption and the restoration of the African state's sovereign political entity in world affairs was still a dream without fulfillment. ~ John Henrik Clarke

Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart. ~ Trent Zelazny

There's something about the idea of writing, and thinking about writing as a form of prayer - the way as a writer you call out into the world and throw your words into the world. You're not praying to a god, but you're almost conjuring a reader to arrive. That's what books do: they're an invitation to readers. ~ Ruth Ozeki

Seems to me a writer gets to hold a lot of keys," she said. "Gets to visit a lot of worlds and live in a lot of skins. Seems to me a writer has a chance to live forever, if he's good and if he's lucky. ~ Robert McCammon

As TV and film writer/director Joss Whedon said, "The enemy of Humanism is not faith - the enemy of Humanism is hate, it is fear, it is ignorance, it is the darker part of man that is in every Humanist, and every person in the world ... But faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God means believing absolutely in something, with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers."4 ~ Greg M. Epstein

I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at 'The Saturday Review' and 'Horizon.' ~ Edmund White

If I'm moving too fast or coming on too hard... ~ N.D. Jones

After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more. ~ Jasper Fforde

But he knew people and he was head writer for Have Gun Will Travel, and if you took those early Star Treks that we did and put us in a western wardrobe and put us on wagon train going west, we can say the same lines. ~ Majel Barrett

Growing up in the Bible Belt of Texas, I thought for sure there was no way - if I'm 100 percent true to myself and come out as a gay, African-American person in 2015 - that people are going to be able to accept that and understand it. ~ Todrick Hall

Lansens is a willing storyteller ... As a writer, she desires a particular kind of reader, one who wants above all to be transported
who might sit at her knee, the hearth. ~ Noah Richler

I am convinced that anyone can be a great writer ... if he can only ... tell the naked truth about himself and other people. That, a little technique with words and the willingness to bare heart, soul and body are really all it takes. ~ Clive Barnes

There's a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he's African American. There's no question about that and it's the kind of thing nobody ever says but everybody's thinking it. ~ Oprah Winfrey

The writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always. ~ Arthur Miller

I want to go to college for literature. I want to be a writer. I mean, I love what I do, but its not all I want to do-be a professional liar for the rest of my life. ~ Kristen Stewart

The best thing about a being a writer is the creative process. I often describe it as a beautiful headache that I wouldn't change for anything. ~ Nicole Huggins

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither ... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger. ~ Toni Morrison

Every Kenyan writer has offered me something to hold onto, something to believe in. ~ Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once. ~ Joe Meno

As you know, I am not a writer but a Party functionary. But like every Communist I consider myself to have been mobilized by Party propaganda and deem it my duty to participate actively in the work of our press. ~ Leonid Brezhnev

There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It's a kind of trick of the mind and he is born with it.
~ Morley Callaghan

I'm an old school actor in the sense. More and more now, I play myself as I get older. Even as a writer, I never got typecast. I've always bounced from project to project or initiated my own things. ~ Jim Piddock

A writer's business is minding other people's business ... all the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer. ~ Dawn Powell

You cannot sing African music in proper English ~ Fela Kuti

As a writer, I always try as hard as possible to get out of the way of the story, so maybe that's the most important thing my readers should know - I'm all about the story, not about the ego. ~ Simon Toyne