Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
BEN OKRIDon’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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 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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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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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
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In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.
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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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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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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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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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.
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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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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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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.
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Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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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
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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest.
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Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you’ve got left is your belief in the imagination.
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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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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
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You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.
BEN OKRI