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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

Ben Okri

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
BEN OKRI

Artist Broken Enemy
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
BEN OKRI

Facts Hint Perfection
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
BEN OKRI

Fear Heart Telling Stories
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.
BEN OKRI

Character Country Ghetto
The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
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Artist Imagination Secret
I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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Capable Humans Knows
I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
BEN OKRI

Fighting People Share
To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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Belief Quite Situation Something
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
BEN OKRI

Order Smile Squares
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
BEN OKRI

Create Eventually Make People
There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…
BEN OKRI

Fighting Heroism People
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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Office Perfect Writing
People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.
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Create History People Protected Transformer
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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Country Home Literature
I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
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Again Down Up Change
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.
BEN OKRI

Cause Destiny Rivers

A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

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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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