One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
BEN OKRIIf 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
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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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 best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.
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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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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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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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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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What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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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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To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they
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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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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
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