Daily Inspiration Quote by Wole Soyinka

Soyinka frames playwriting less as solitary genius and more as a live social contract. The line sounds modest, almost domestic, but it’s a stealth manifesto about what theater is for: not self-expression in a vacuum, but calibrated communication with a roomful of bodies. “Even when I’m writing” signals resistance to the romantic myth of the isolated artist. He’s confessing a preference for noise, presence, interruption - the textures of community that keep the work honest.

The key move is “mentally”: the company isn’t necessarily literal; it’s an imagined audience that disciplines the page. Soyinka is describing craft as accountability. When you picture specific listeners, you write differently: you tighten rhythm, you sharpen stakes, you respect attention spans. It’s also a hint of performance baked into his prose. He doesn’t just draft dialogue; he hears it land. The company becomes an internal chorus testing whether a line cuts, whether a pause breathes, whether a joke curdles into cruelty.

Context matters: Soyinka’s theater comes out of Yoruba performance traditions and a political life shaped by censorship, imprisonment, and the high-risk business of public speech in postcolonial Nigeria. In that environment, “company” isn’t only aesthetic; it’s civic. To write for “company” is to imagine a people who might need coded critique, shared symbols, and collective catharsis. The subtext is a refusal of elite remove: art as something made with an audience in mind, because the audience is where power, and danger, actually are.