Art should be on the side of humanity.

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.

When we hear a house has fallen do we ask if the ceiling fell with it?

I don't want to be the one to tell somebody, You will not make it, even though I know that the majority of those who come to me with their manuscripts are not really good enough.

I know that an important message is not a novel. To say that we should all be kind to our neighbors is an important statement; it's not a novel.

I do not actually see how art, literature can be anything other that being in that domain of trying to tell us, trying to get us to see what is important in our lives.

Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write.