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.
BEN OKRIIt 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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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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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
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The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
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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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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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Literature doesn’t have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
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I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
BEN OKRI