Daily Inspiration Quote by Wole Soyinka

There is a sly kind of authority in calling your own novel an accident. Soyinka isn’t just downplaying a credential; he’s refusing a label that can domesticate a writer’s public image. “Novelist” is a market category, a shelving instruction, a polite way of pinning someone down. For a dramatist whose work has long been entangled with power, censorship, and the theatre’s immediacy, that pin can feel like a trap.

The phrasing does two things at once. “I don’t really consider myself” keeps authorship personal and provisional, not a professional badge handed out by publishers. Then “purely by accident” performs an almost mischievous anti-myth: not the solemn artist destined to write The Novel, but a practitioner who followed material where it led. The subtext is competence without credentialism. If the novel “came out” anyway, it suggests the form wasn’t a lifelong aspiration but a tool picked up when drama couldn’t hold what he needed to say.

Context matters: Soyinka’s career is defined by genre-crossing under political pressure, where form is often dictated by circumstance - what can be staged, what can circulate, what can survive. Calling a novel an accident is also a quiet critique of literary gatekeeping in postcolonial and global literary culture: the expectation that a “serious” writer must produce novels to be legible internationally. He sidesteps that hierarchy with a shrug, implying that the work’s urgency precedes its packaging. The accident, in other words, is strategic.