Ben Okri Quotes
Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.
Quotes to Explore
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Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
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I've got plenty of quirks. I go to an office early in the morning. Early in the morning is really good writing time. I take anywhere between six to eight showers a day. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not a germaphobe: it's all about a fresh start.
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I haven't found it to be particularly enjoyable... ninety percent of the time when I go on dates, I'm thinking, 'I could be reading my book instead.'
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One half who graduate from college never read another book.
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The strongest results were in Florida and Texas. In just one year in a Texas charter school, an average student gained 7 percentile points in math and 8 percentile points in reading, while Florida charter schools improved student performance by 6 percentile points.
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Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.
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Every book I write, the media just keeps punching me in the face.
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I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book.
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Now I'm an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.
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I was always more interested in my books and my writing than going out. It's OK to say I'm a nerd. That's me.
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Writing is a creative process, and you need to have the doors and windows of your mind open so that you have the possibility of change.
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Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
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From 1999 on - until 2003 - I covered publishing in a weekly column for Wired.com and wrote for several other publications - altogether writing over 150 articles.
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The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.
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Whether you want to entertain or to provoke, to break hearts or reassure them, what you bring to your writing must consist of your longings and disappointments.
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A book tour is not a good opportunity to let your mind wander. You have to pay attention, remember salespeople's and interviewers' names, succinctly summarize your book in a 'selling' way, and so on.
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So many people are working in vaudeville today that I looked for three weeks to book enough acts for an hour bill and didn't have them until the night before we opened in Buffalo and money was no object!
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Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.
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Maybe it's the buildings, maybe it's the weather, but you can see it affects us - that Scottish gallows humour; our tendency towards bleakness, to look at things in a negative way. Those definitely come out in my writing.
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I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.
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When you mess up, what are you going to do? Just keep going. And speak loudly.
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I want to concentrate on work and won't do anything to divert my concentration.
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There is a point at which the law becomes immoral and unethical. That point is reached when it becomes a cloak for the cowardice that dares not stand up against blatant violations of justice.
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Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.
