Ben Okri Quotes
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
Quotes to Explore
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I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency. I anticipate criticism; but however unfavorable I trust that my sincerity will not be called into question.
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I am not sure that you, the younger generations, will like to go to war that we went through. So, we learn as the mistakes are being committed.
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I was mostly an indoor girl at university. Where other students did drama or music or sport alongside their degrees, I wrote. I used to work on essays and classwork during the day and 'The Bone Season' in the evenings.
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Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amid joy.
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People always ask me if I'm nervous about the intense sci-fi fans. To me that doesn't seem weird or scary. I get really intense about my favorite sci-fi shows, my favorite shows in general.
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My favorite big city would have to be Chicago. I lived in Indiana for several years and would always go into the city with my family for Cubs games or to visit the aquarium and museums on field trips.
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In a city, it's very hard to do a restaurant, an avant-garde-cuisine restaurant, where each year you need to change the whole menu.
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All I have to do to continue to make things work is make great records, and that's more important than having a crazy master plan.
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The day I make movies that Rupert Murdoch likes and admires is the day I'll throw in the towel, because he's got no taste.
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When I think about voting, I can skip it and still see myself as a good citizen. But when I think about being a voter, now the choice reflects on my character. It casts a shadow.
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Almost all of us growing up have played baseball on some level. It has an inside track with people. It has a unifying effect.
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I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.
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The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment.
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I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
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Fate is written in the face.
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Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
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Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.
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Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker.
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Thus the public use of reason and freedom is nothing but a dessert, a sumptuous dessert.
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Hatred is corrosive of a person's wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and block a nation's progress to freedom and democracy.
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Life is a full meal.
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The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.
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We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
