The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
BEN OKRII know that human beings are capable of anything.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
BEN OKRI -
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 OKRI -
A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
BEN OKRI -
We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
BEN OKRI -
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
BEN OKRI -
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.
BEN OKRI -
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.
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 -
The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
BEN OKRI -
I was going to be a scientist.
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 -
The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it
BEN OKRI -
a dream can be the highest point of a life
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 -
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
BEN OKRI