“If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place. And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses– would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?”
-Rainer Maria Rilke

“The fiction which imaginative literature offers us…does not enslave; it liberates the mind of man. Its truth is not like the canons of an orthodoxy or the irrationality of prejudice and superstition. It begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and human conscience.”
-Chinua Achebe

“My theory of the uses of fiction is that beneficent fiction calls into full life our total range of imaginative faculties and gives us a heightened sense of our personal, social and human reality.”
-Chinua Achebe

“It is a truism and cliché that experience is the best teacher; it is even arguable whether we can truly know anything which we have not personally experienced. But our imagination can narrow the existential gap by giving us in a wide range of human situations the closest approximation to experience that we are ever likely to get, and sometimes the safest too.”
-Chinua Achebe

“Life is short and art is long, said the ancients…This is why human societies have always attempted to sustain their cultural values by carefully preserved oral or written literatures which provide for them and their posterity.”
-Chinua Achebe

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”
- Ernest Hemingway

“The emotion of a character must be expressed through action, through the senses—not thought.”
- Ernest Hemingway

“It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, it’s form and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth—disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing movement. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.”
- Joseph Conrad