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.
BEN OKRIA man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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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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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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Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
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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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Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
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A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation… Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
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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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The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it
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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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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.
BEN OKRI