Art is a weapon and the weapons can change the world. Good art is irreverent, excessive, controversial, incorrect, irritating, ironic, bad behaving, playful and beautiful or ugly.

My weapon is literature

My secret weapon is my anger. That's what stimulates me as an artist. I want change. I want it yesterday. I'm pissed off at America. Society. American movies. American TV. American culture. American politicians. Capitalism. [...] Impatience and rage are always just beneath the surface for me.

Quite often I have used my poetry as a sword, and I have brandished it against my internal and external demons.

I am a student of literature and history. I believe that art is a powerful tool for us in our society to use, to depict all the things that are going on, and a possible escape for some of us who are traumatized by the things we see in Nigeria.

Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands.

[A]rgument is a... form of the art of fighting—with words... inspired by... getting nearer to... truth...

Swearing's my release, and the one weapon I have to defend myself against destiny when it elects to strike without pity.

Art is a substitute for violence. The same impulses that drive persons to violence — the hunger for meaning, the need for ecstasy, the impulse to risk all — drive the artist to create. He is by nature our archrebel. … the essence of the rebellion is in the new way of seeing nature and life.

My multiple identities empower me to fashion my writing into an effective weapon fighting against injustices meted out by holders of abusive power onto underprivileged groups in society.

And thus I arrive at the foundation of my theory about art as a vehicle for dissent: the fury and purity of the creator’s need to say something motivates the work, but he forms it from logic and craft and honesty and when the propaganda value has faded into last week’s imperative, the art remains behind and stands on its own merits.

I create art because a single image can convey a thousand words.

With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.

I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we weren't aware of before. We want to transform ourselves, just as Ovid's masterwork transformed me.