“To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. … That’s what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.”

One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.

Our time here is magic! It’s the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It’s the only space.

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.

We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.

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.

I was going to be a scientist.

I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.

The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.

It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.

If we wait for conditions to go from good to perfect, we’ll just be waiting, waiting, waiting.

A curve ball is not something you can pick up overnight. It took me years to perfect mine.

I am pre-disposed to try and show the conflict; the regret; the less-than-perfect choices that any human faces. That’s what I like and it seems to be what the camera likes to see me do.

God is dead but my hair is perfect.

Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment.

It’s not the things I don’t understand about the Bible that bother me; it’s the things I understand with perfect clarity and don’t comply with that keep me up at night.

Your past may not be perfect, but it was perfect for your purpose.

You still won’t be perfect, but success isn’t about perfection-it is about authenticity. You are a success if you are being your real, authentic self.