Quotes by Sembene Ousmane

• As far as I am concerned, I no longer support notions of purity. Purity has become
  a thing of the past . . . I constantly question myself. I am neither looking for a school
  nor for a solution but asking questions and making others think. (qtd. in Niang 176)
• For us, African filmmakers, it was then necessary to become political, to become involved in a struggle against all the ills of man’s cupidity, envy, individualism, the noveau-riche mentality, and all the things we have inherited from the colonial and neo-colonial systems.
• The cinema can speak across the divisions created by illiteracy and language… It can participate in the oral cultural tradition; it can produce a culture in which the Wolof language plays a major role; and it can bring the Wolof culture into the modernity of the post-colonial.
• Creation is never detached from the social context of the man himself.
• I see things around me, and every event deserves to be recounted . . . it’s usually a little bit of news, a speck of an event. I see something, I tell myself, ‘Wait, that’s got to be told.’
• I dig, dig, dig, dig, until I find the end of my story. And I think that in my case, this is the hardest time. Because I also have to try to see why this, and why that. I write the same things over four or five times. I ask myself if I’m satisfied. Then I reformulate the questions, and I believe it’s there that the mathematical side of creation enters. I remain convinced that there is a very emotional side, but there is also an important intellectual element.
• It’s the continuity of the story which interests me. There are times when there are people obsessing me, figures whom I didn’t expect to find. You see, these people are pressing themselves on me.