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 OKRII learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
BEN OKRI -
Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
BEN OKRI -
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI -
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.
BEN OKRI -
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 -
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.
BEN OKRI -
Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
BEN OKRI -
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
BEN OKRI -
Don’t despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.
BEN OKRI -
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
BEN OKRI -
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI -
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
BEN OKRI -
The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
BEN OKRI -
A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
BEN OKRI -
I know that human beings are capable of anything.
BEN OKRI