I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
BEN OKRIDon’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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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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I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends’ floors, was happy, was miserable.
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This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
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We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It’s just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there.
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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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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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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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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People that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.
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Our time here is magic! It’s the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It’s the only space.
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Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
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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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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.
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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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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
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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 strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
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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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