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.
BEN OKRIThe greatest religions convert the world through stories.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
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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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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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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.
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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.
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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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Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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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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Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
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If we are true, if we can love, if we have vision, if we can have courage, we can, we should, we ought to, we will.
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One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’
BEN OKRI