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 OKRIWe have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It’s just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there.
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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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I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
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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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We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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a dream can be the highest point of a life
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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they
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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 worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it
BEN OKRI