Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole SoyinkaRead
When I write plays, I'm already seeing the shapes on stage, of the actors and their interaction, and so on and so forth. I don't think I've ever written one play as an abstract piece, as a literary piece, floating in the air somewhere, to be flushed out later on.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses the author's immersive and visual approach to playwriting, emphasizing the importance of staging and character interaction.
Wole Soyinka describes his unique process of playwriting, where he envisions the overall production in its entirety rather than just focusing on the text. For him, each play comes to life through the interactions of actors and the visual elements of the stage, highlighting that the performance is integral to the writing process rather than an afterthought.
Themes
PlaywritingTheaterActorsStagingImagination
In practice
Example use cases
In a theater workshop, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of visualizing a scene before writing it.
More from Wole Soyinka
All quotes →Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.
Wole SoyinkaRead
A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment more than buildings: It must shatter the foundations of thought and re-create. Only in this way does every individual share in the cataclysm and understand the purpose of sacrifice.
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Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.
Wole SoyinkaRead
I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.
Wole SoyinkaRead
Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
Wole SoyinkaRead
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