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.
I've learned that I get blocked when my subconscious mind is telling me that I've taken the work in a wrong direction, and that once I start listening to what my subconscious is trying to tell me, I can work out the problem and get moving again.
Maybe subconsciously I feel I was meant to work hard for a living.
I kind of think we sort of subconsciously draw things into our lives, whatever we're trying to work through.
Well, I think in my own work the subject matter usually deals with characters I know, aspects of myself, friends of mine - that sort of thing.
I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.
The nature of my work is my subjectivity meshed with other people's subjectivity. So there's a correspondence with that... Even if you write about me, it will reflect on you; everything is a kind of weird collaboration.
Always attempting to tame and subjugate nature is not the solution. But the latest science is helping us to map out a path across this shifting landscape in uncertain times, showing us how to work with natural forces, not against them.
Slavery was not a bad day on the job. It was not your boss yelling at you. It was not hard work for little pay. This was a full system of human subjugation.
As a feminist of Egyptian and Muslim descent, my life's work has been informed by the belief that religion and culture must never be used to justify the subjugation of women.
I like the relationship between the master and the student. Each piece has new problems, and each is different. They're all an indentured servitude. There's that subjugation that you have to put yourself under. It's a give and take. There is work involved, and during that time, the greatest things are revealed.
What the flamingo teaches a child, at that subliminal level where animal encounters work, is that gravity is not just a limitation, but also a possible partner in an intriguing, potentially joyful game.
Because I was able to submerge myself into the character, I didn't have to go back and forth. You don't have to work hard to bring emotions. It all just comes naturally, you're there living it.
I am not a passive person, but I chose to fall into a more submissive role in our relationship because I wanted to do everything in my power to make my marriage and family work.
Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.
It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.
Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea that they subsequently express with their hands.
As long as I can make lots of money in other businesses, I'll continue to subsidize my own work.
A record is a commodity, but so is a hamburger. Just because I work at McDonald's doesn't mean I reap the benefits of that commodity. That's the reality with most artists in the record industry: They're getting paid a subsistence wage so they can keep producing a commodity for the record label.
I grew up around books. When I first held the book and it was a substantive, tangible thing, and I thought of all the work that went into it, not just my work but everybody else's and the research and so forth, there's a sense of really have done something worthwhile.
