The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
BEN OKRIPeople that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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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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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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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.
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Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
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To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. … That’s what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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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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When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.
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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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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.
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