Ben Okri Quotes
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Fire is one of my temperaments. It is behind all my work... Fire is a chemical presence.
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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.
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Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power.
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I am one year older than Nigeria at 51. In a human life, 51 might be old. But it is very young for a nation. By that, I mean a Nigeria conscious of itself as a nation.
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Home can be the friend you have been searching for all your life or the person you met once very briefly.
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The worst time was 1983. Love and life and everything went wrong. I reached absolute rock bottom. I saw the Minotaur at the bottom of the abyss. I learnt of the harshness of the world and its impartiality to human failure.
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The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.
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The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
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I was going to be a scientist.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in.
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Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
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If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft.
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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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We never think that our mothers will die. It was like suddenly an abyss opened at my feet - I was standing on nothing. It was the strangest thing. Her passing away ripped the solidity out of the world.
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I study people all the time. For some reason, we're not very good at seeing what's there or hearing what we're hearing.
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The poem is never complete in the mind. It emerges, and then it's like an act of unveiling. The unveiling is the longest and most difficult part of it.
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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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I became a sceptic of one way of seeing the world. And I think it is what started me in my awareness that any worldview is superstitious.
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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Some of my reactions are very Nigerian. I still believe that words are things.
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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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You cannot come to a Nigerian restaurant without having pepper soup.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.