Ben Okri Quotes
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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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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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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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The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
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The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
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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 know that human beings are capable of anything.
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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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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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Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
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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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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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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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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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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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I was going to be a scientist.
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Some of my reactions are very Nigerian. I still believe that words are things.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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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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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.