A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
BEN OKRIThe higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
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Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train.
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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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I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
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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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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
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When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.
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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation… Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.
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In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
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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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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 OKRI