My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience. I never know who's influencing me at any time.

— Wole Soyinka

One has a responsibility to clean up one's space and make it livable as far as one's own resources go. That includes not only material resources, but psychological resources: the commitment of time and a portion of your mind to something when you'd rather be doing something else.

— Wole Soyinka

Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.

— Wole Soyinka

Power, of course. The primitive fear of being controlled. It does not matter whether it is an invasion from outer space or power wielded from a subterranean command post: some alien force is about to take control on us, to dominate - and, if necessary in the process, to terminate our existence. We never stop to think - or, at best, a secondary consideration is whether such a force might be for the good, that humanity might indeed be improved by such a takeover. Volition, to which we desperately cling, is the very definition of our mature completion as social beings.

— Wole Soyinka

Romance is the sweetening of the soul With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.

— Wole Soyinka

Sadly, it is within the religious domain that the phenomenon of rhetorical hysteria takes its most devastating form. I am aware that, in some minds, this tends to be regarded as a delicate subject. Let me declare very simply that I do not share such a sentiment. There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents. We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life. One of my all-time favorite lines comes from the black American poet Langston Hughes. It reads, simply, 'There is no lavender word for lynch'.

— Wole Soyinka

So, once again, back to the question - just what IS power? Is it perhaps no more than a deadly mutation of ambition, one that may or may not translate into social activity? Any fool, any moron, any psychopath can aspire to the seizure and exercise of power, and of course the more psychopathic, the more efficient: Hitler, Pol Pot, ID Amin, Sergeant Doe and the latest in the line of the unconscionably driven, our own lately departed General Sunni Apache - all have proved that power, as long as you are sufficiently ruthless, amoral and manipulative, is within the grasp of even the mentally deficient.

— Wole Soyinka

The arrogant elimination of the Dugouts of our world must nerve us to pursue our own combative doctrine, namely: that peaceful cohabitation on this planet demands that while the upholders of any creed are free to adopt their own existential absolutes, the right of others to do the same is thereby rendered implicit and sacrosanct. Thus, the creed of inquiry, of knowledge and exchange of ideas, must be upheld as an absolute, as ancient and eternal as any other.

— Wole Soyinka

The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest killing device of contemporary times.

— Wole Soyinka

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

— Wole Soyinka