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.
BEN OKRISuccess will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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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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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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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
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The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
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If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.
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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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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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We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.
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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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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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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.
BEN OKRI








