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
BEN OKRIThere ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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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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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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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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a dream can be the highest point of a life
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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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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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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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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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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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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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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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
BEN OKRI