Achebe, Chinua Filmography

• Things Fall Apart
  1987, role: writer
• Things Fall Apart
  1971, role: writer

Famous quotes by Chinua Achebe:

"Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again."

"Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world."

"The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; It is this."

"A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself."

"People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories."

"What's important is that we recognize the falsehood of the notion that the Third World should be abandoned because it's a waste of time."

"People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them. This is what people have come to expect. It's not viewed as a serious continent. It's a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people don't do what common sense demands."

"When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see."

"One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised."

"When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool."

"Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him."

"What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender."

"An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people."

"Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story."

"Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country."

"A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership."

"They have not always elected the best leaders, particularly after a long period in which they have not used this facility of free election. You tend to lose the habit."

"Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively."

"I've had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the country because of difference in religion. These are things we should put behind us."

"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."