This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
BEN OKRIReading, 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.
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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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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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Maybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.
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The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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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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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 went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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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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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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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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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One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.
BEN OKRI






