I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
BEN OKRICreativity is the art of the impossible
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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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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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
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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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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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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
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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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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
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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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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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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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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
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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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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
BEN OKRI