Wainaina Kiandege Quotes

#1. I want to be fighting for a society accountable towards its citizens. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#2. There's no point for me in being a writer and having all these blocked places where I feel I can't think freely and imagine freely. There just really is no point. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#3. People reach an age ... where somebody else's platform is no longer yours. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#4. I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#5. When art as an expression starts to appear, without prompting, all over the suburbs and villages of this country, what we are saying is: we are confident enough to create our own living, our own entertainment, our own aesthetic. Such an aesthetic will not be donated to us from the corridors of a university; or from the Ministry of Culture, or by the French Cultural Centre. It will come from the individual creations of a thousand creative people #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#6. Every human being has a bit of gangster in him. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#7. It is a pink and blue feeling, as sharp as clear sky; a slight breeze, and the edges of Lake Nakuru would rise like the ruffle at the edge of a skirt; and I am pockmarked with whole-body pinpricks of potentiality. A stretch of my body would surely stretch as far as the sky. The whole universe poised, and I am the agent of any movement. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#8. It's like I was always not quite sure even how to move in space somehow; I would watch people and then copy them. I found it really hard to walk straight. My brother was always on at me for walking off the pavement. I guess I always expected people to bring me back into line. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#9. I knew I didn't want to come out in the 'New Yorker'; it just felt wrong. It needed an African conversation. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#10. International correspondents with their long dictaphones, and dirty jeans, and five hundred words before whiskey, are slouched over the red velvet chairs, in the VIP section in the front, looking for the Story: the Most Macheteing Deathest, Most Treasury Corruptest, Most Entrail-Eating Civil Warest, Most Crocodile-Grinning Dictatorest, MOst Heart-Wrenching and Genociding Pulitzerest, Most Black Big-Eyed Oxfam Child Starvingest, Most Wild African Savages Having AIDS-Ridden Sexest with Genetically Mutilatedest Girls ... The Most Authentic Real Black Africanest story they can find ... #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#11. Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel prize. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#12. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#13. Every one, we, we homosexuals, are people, and we need our oxygen to breathe. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#14. I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether it's with Africa or childhood. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#15. I have learned that I, we, are a dollar-a-day people (which is terrible, they say, because a cow in Japan is worth $9 a day). This means that a Japanese cow would be a middle class Kenyan ... a $9-a-day cow from Japan could very well head a humanitarian NGO in Kenya. Massages are very cheap in Nairobi, so the cow would be comfortable. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#16. I'm extremely optimistic about rapid transformation and change of things in Africa in general. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#17. Living in South Africa and periodically coming back to Kenya, my relationship with officialdom in Kenya was just insane. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#18. When I went to live in South Africa, I immediately began to understand what went wrong. Because here was a place supposed to be under apartheid - I arrived there in 1991 - but here a black person had more say and had more influence over his white government than an average Kenyan had over the Moi government. #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#19. In kindergarten, we had this Irish Catholic headmistress called Sister Leonie, and I remember she would tell us, say, to put the crayons in the box. I remember thinking, 'Why is everyone finding this so easy? Why should the crayons be in the box?' #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina

#20. I am quite excited that Moi is leaving. Kenyans have changed. We have a free press, and it is no longer a situation of 'follow in my footsteps.' #Quote by Binyavanga Wainaina