The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
BEN OKRIWe are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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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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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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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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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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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.
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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.
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The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
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Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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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.
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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.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you’ve got left is your belief in the imagination.
BEN OKRI