An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
BEN OKRI
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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.
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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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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We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
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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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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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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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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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Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do.
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One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.
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The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
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Maybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.
BEN OKRI