Tags: communists, salvador dali
Chinua Achebe (b. November 16): “My weapon is literature.”
16 Nov
Chinua Achebe (born 16 November 1930, died 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. He was best known for his first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart, which sold more than 8 million copies around the world, and was translated into 50 languages. Achebe was the most translated African writer of all time. Nelson Mandela referred to Achebe as a writer ‘in whose company the prison walls fell down’. The recipient of more than 30 honorary degrees, he was awarded the Man Booker International Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, an Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Nigerian National Order of Merit.
Quotes on writing:
- My weapon is literature.
- If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.
- Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control.
- If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.
- The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.
- To me, being an intellectual doesn’t mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
- Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am – and what I need – is something I have to find out myself.
- The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor’s domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.
- Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey through the world.
- It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.
Roland Barthes (b. November 12): “Language is a skin” & other obsessions
12 Nov
Roland Barthes (born 12 November 1915, died 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist and critic who influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.
Quotes on language:
- Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
- I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
- Take the gesture, the action of writing. I have an almost obsessive relation to writing instruments. I often switch from one pen to another just for the pleasure of it. I try out new ones. I have far too many pens – I don’t know what to do with all of them! And yet, as soon as I see a new one, I start craving it. I cannot keep myself from buying them.
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