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 OKRIThe 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
More Ben Okri Quotes
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It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.
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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
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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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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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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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Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.
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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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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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I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.
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If 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
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