Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.
BEN OKRII went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
BEN OKRI -
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
BEN OKRI -
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI -
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
BEN OKRI -
People that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.
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Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do.
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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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I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
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I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.
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We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
BEN OKRI -
a dream can be the highest point of a life
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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
BEN OKRI -
There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.
BEN OKRI -
The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
BEN OKRI -
I was going to be a scientist.
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People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.
BEN OKRI -
We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
BEN OKRI -
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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Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
BEN OKRI -
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.
BEN OKRI -
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
BEN OKRI -
Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
BEN OKRI -
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
BEN OKRI -
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
BEN OKRI