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 OKRIThis 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
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The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
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We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
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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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What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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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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I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
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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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
BEN OKRI







