The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
BEN OKRILiterature 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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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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a dream can be the highest point of a life
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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
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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 was going to be a scientist.
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A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
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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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The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.
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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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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
BEN OKRI