The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
BEN OKRIWhen you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
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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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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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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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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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Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.
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I was going to be a scientist.
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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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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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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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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.’
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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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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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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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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