Chinua Achebe, 82



On history: "There is that great proverb … that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter."

On Nigeria: "I don't praise my people. I am their greatest critic."

On literature: "Imaginative literature … does not enslave; it liberates the mind of man. Its truth is not like the canons of orthodoxy or the irrationality of prejudice and superstition. It begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and humane conscience."

On growing up: "I knew I loved stories, stories told in our home, first by my mother, then by my elder sister – such as the story of the tortoise –… whatever scraps of stories I could gather from conversations, just from hanging around, sitting around when my father had visitors... Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn't know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not … they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories … Once I realised that I had to be a writer."

On writing: "I have said in the kind of exaggerated manner of writers and prophets that writing, for me, is like receiving a term of imprisonment – you know that's what you're in for, for whatever time it takes. So it is both pleasurable and difficult."

On being a writer: "The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer."

On women:

"The role of women in my traditional culture – that they do not interfere in politics until men really make such a mess that the society is unable to go backward or forward. Then women will move in."

On the western view of Africa: "Although the work of redressing which needs to be done may appear too daunting, I believe it is not one day too soon to begin."

On Biafra: "Biafra stands for true independence in Africa, for an end to the 400 years of shame and humiliation which we have suffered in our association with Europe… I believe our cause is right and just. And this is what literature should be about today – right and just causes."

On Nigerian independence: "It was as if the rains had come after a long period of harsh winds and bushfires … Only later did we learn that you cannot grant freedom in that way, we should have taken it on our own terms. So year by year we found ourselves saying that we didn't like this, or weren't sure about that. We didn't have enough scepticism and should have known from simple human instinct that things were not shaping up the way they should. Then came the coup, and then the counter-coup and soon after we were engaged in civil war."

On England: "My first reaction to England was one of enlightenment. I realised they were really not so much better than us, and in some ways they were worse than us. But I also realised that they had their house in order in many ways we didn't. So the visit acted as a sort of correction to what I thought the world was, but also a realisation that we had to put our own house in order and not count on other people to do it for us."

On writing in English: "I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings."

On his critics: "Some people will say, Why does he put in all these Nigerian-English words? Some critics say that in frustration. And I feel like saying to them, 'Go to hell! That's the way the story was given to me. And if you don't want to make this amount of effort, the kind of effort that my people have always made to understand Europe and the rest of the world, if you won't make this little leap, then leave it alone!'"

Iain Banks, 59



Iain Banks by the Forth Rail Bridge near his home. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

On his final novel, The Quarry: "If I'd known it was going to be my last book, I'd have been quite disappointed that I'm going out with a relatively minor piece; whereas something like Transition, a wild splurge of fantasy, sci-fi and mad reality frothed up together … now that would have been a book to go out on. I'm still very proud of The Quarry but … let's face it; in the end the real best way to sign off would have been with a great big rollicking Culture novel."

On prizes: "I'm not a great believer in awards – of course the fact that I've never won one has nothing to do with it at all!"

On writing: "The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't. It's incredibly annoying for us scribblers. A lot of the time you're simply deciding how far down the path of unlikeliness you can go while still retaining the willing suspension of disbelief in the reader."

On writing SF: "If you are going to write what a friend of a friend once called 'Made up space shit', then if it's going to have any ring of truth that means sometimes some of the horrible characters get to live, and for there to be any sense of jeopardy, especially in future novels, the good people have to die. Sometimes."

On politics: "My injured self-respect can at least fall back on the fact that I never voted for New Labour – Labour yes, and nothing but Labour for as long as it existed and I could vote, but not for a party that embraced privatisation and refused to scrap nuclear weapons; not for a party slightly to the right of Ted Heath's government."

On Thatcher: "There was nothing symbolic about her death, because her baleful influence on British politics remains undiminished. Squeeze practically any Tory, any Blairite and any Lib Dem of the Orange Book persuasion, and it's the same poisonous Thatcherite pus that comes oozing out."

On the war on terror: "The great lie that our boys are fighting, killing and dying in Afghanistan to keep us safe. It's 180 degrees off the truth. They're dying worse than needlessly; they're dying to save political face, and for every grieving or just aggrieved Afghan family we create the conditions for further atrocities to be visited on us."

On Scottish independence: "The difference between the Scottish and the English, which I guess we have to put down to cultural differences (though of course it could be something in the water) are sufficient and long-term enough that this effective divorce between Scotland and England makes sense for both parties."

On mortality: "I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it's not about you."

Announcing that he had been diagnosed with late-stage gall bladder cancer: "I am officially very poorly."

On marriage: "I've asked my partner Adele if she will do me the honour of becoming my widow (sorry – but we find ghoulish humour helps)."

On the response to his announcement: "I feel treasured. I feel loved. I feel I've done more than just pursue the craft I adore and made a living from it, and more than just fulfil the only real ambition I've ever had – of becoming a professional writer."

On old age: "You look at the decrepitude of the very old and ill, and at least I'll be spared years of that. It'll be over fairly quickly. There's a wee bit of what Guy says in The Quarry about being well rid of some of the more ignoble aspects of the present day."

On dying young: "So, yes, I'm annoyed I won't get to vote in the referendum. I'm annoyed I won't get to ride an Edinburgh tram and I'm annoyed I won't get to go on the new Fife crossing."

On alternative cancer treatments: "Like running into a burning building and trying to put the fire out by means of interpretative dance."

On religion: "It's what religion does with [our] drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not."

On his cancer: "It was a high-energy particle. A star exploded hundreds or thousands of years ago and ever since there's been a cosmic ray – a bad-magic bullet with my name on it, to quote Ken [McLeod] – heading towards the moment where it hit one of my cells and mutated it. That's an SF author's way to bow out; none of this banal transcription error stuff."

On luck: "I've had a brilliant life, and I think I've been more lucky than unlucky, even including the news of the cancer."

Seamus Heaney, 74



Seamus Heaney. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the Guardian

On inspiration: "The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself."

On writing: "The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful … to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself."

On poetry: "I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing. The challenge for the writer, book by book, is to conjure a stepping stone that carries you forward."

On Ireland: "No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration."

On the Troubles: "At one minute, you are drawn towards the old vortex of racial and religious instinct, at another time you seek the mean of human love and reason.'

On being included in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry in 1982: "Be advised/ My passport's green,/ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen."

On the Queen: "I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time."

On winning the Nobel prize: "For once in my life, I am permitting myself the luxury of walking on air."

On getting old: "The problem as you get older … is that you become more self-aware. At the same time you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky. You're either obsessed or you're surprised. There's no halfway house."

On mortality: "No matter what kind of secularisation occurs, there is a huge co-ordinate established for consciousness from the beginning, that sense of the outer shimmering rim of everything always being there in your imagination. Maybe that explains it – the soul being whipped away and the roof coming off and you being exposed to that infinity that occurs after the death of your parents."

Last words: "Noli timere" – Don't be afraid (in a text message to his wife, Marie).

Epitaph: "Wherever that man went, he went gratefully." (Heaney cited his own translation of the Messenger in Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles as the epitaph he would like.)

Elmore Leonard, 87



Elmore Leonard. Photograph: Marc Hauser Photography Ltd/Getty Images

On writing westerns: "When I started writing, I wanted to make money right away and I chose westerns because of the market."

On writing crime: "When the western market disappeared because of television, I switched to crime which I considered a very commercial genre, to continue to write, but since I didn't come out of the Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler school, I came up with what I think is a different approach to crime fiction, in that the emphasis is on the characters and not the plot."

On characters: "My characters have to talk, or they're out. They audition in early scenes. If they can't talk, they're given less to do, or thrown out."

On plot: "I don't worry about the plot. You can think of a plot in five minutes."

On when to open a book with a description of weather: "Never."

On influences: "I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realised Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humour. He never has anything funny in his stories."

On religion: "I was brought up Catholic. I don't go to receive the sacrament anymore. But it's important to me to go through this little drill about what my purpose is before I get out of bed every morning."

On using a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue: "Never."

On using an adverb to modify the verb "said": "Never."

On giving up drinking: "I never relied on alcohol for the writing. And I was able to let go of it. The writing definitely improved: you know, I was waking up in the morning for the first time with a clear head, wanting breakfast."

On exclamation marks: "You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose."

On making the bad guy likable: "I put myself in his place. He doesn't think he's doing an evil thing. I try to see the antagonist at another time – when he sneezes, say. I see convicts sitting around talking about a baseball game. I see them as kids. All villains have mothers."

On fan mail: "Whenever I hear from anybody who is in prison, they all want to know if I have done time."

On how to use regional dialect and patois: "Sparingly."

On literary writers: "Most of these writers don't write for a living. They write for tenure. Or for the New York Times. Or to get invited to conferences. When you write to make the rent or send your kids to school, you learn how to write without a lot of nonsense."

On detailed physical descriptions of characters: "Avoid."

On the movies: "I wanted my books to become movies. That was my aim. I wanted to make some money doing this. My first books, I would get like 2,000 bucks. That was mostly in the 50s, then it went up to $4,000. I didn't really make money from books until the 1980s. But I got a lot more from movies."

On writing for the movies: "A screenplay's not writing."

On being compared to Dickens: "The reference to Dickens first appeared in Time magazine. I was called the Dickens of Detroit. Simply because it was alliterative. I wouldn't have been the Dickens of Chicago."

On aspirant writers: "So many people say, 'I'm dying to write.' Well, if you're dying to write, why aren't you writing? If you're not writing, you're not dying to do it enough."

Doris Lessing, 94

Doris Lessing in 1963. Photograph: Lebrecht Music & Arts/Corbis

On men and women: "Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative – despite what current ideology says. Of course men and women are different. You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much."

On her relationship with her mother: "We hated each other … We were quarrelling right from the start. She wouldn't have chosen me as a daughter. I was landed on her. I must have driven her mad. She thought everything I did was to annoy her. She had an incredible capacity for self-delusion."

On marriage: "Not one of my talents."

On motherhood: "There is no boredom like that of an intelligent woman who spends all day with a very small child."

On leaving her two children in Africa when she emigrated to England in 1949: "While it was a terrible thing to do, it was right to do it."

On communism: "Well that was a great mistake, wasn't it?"

On the "war on terror": "11 September was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible."

On the war in Iraq: "How was it possible that we allowed this monstrous war? Why do we allow wars still? Now we are bogged down in Iraq in an impossible situation. I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars."

On Zimbabwe: "If only it had been possible to say, 'I will only support you if you behave properly once you get into power instead of turning into a murderous beast.' … Instead, we have this ugly little tyrant, Mugabe. An odious man."

On contemporary British fiction: "Small, well-shaped and with too much left out."

On feminism: "I'm not interested in being a feminist icon. If you are a woman and you think at all, you are going to have to write about it, otherwise you aren't writing about the time you are living in. What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible."

On The Golden Notebook: "The second line is 'Everything's cracking up.' That is what The Golden Notebook is about!"

On its afterlife: "This book has got a sort of charge to it. It keeps popping up … and I have to say 'My God, this book has got something. It has got a quality, a vitality.'"

On old age: "I really do think enough is enough. I feel I've lived too long. You just go on so ... I look at all these years, years, years that I have lived through."

On being told she had won the Nobel in 2007: "Oh Christ!"

On winning the Nobel: "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."

On the Swedish Academy: "The whole thing is a joke. The Nobel prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune. I know several people who have won and you don't do anything else for a year but Nobel. They are always coming out with new torments for me…"

On her legacy: "I've met girls who say 'My mother told me to read you, and my grandmother.' That really is something, isn't it?"

• This article was amended on 2 January 2014 to correct the quotation Seamus Heaney said he would like as his epitaph. It is, "Wherever that man went, he went gratefully" – not gracefully.