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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

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Perfection
Story
Fact
Facts
Unease
Tell
Hints
Stories
Imperfection
Human
Fundamental
Humans
Fundamentals

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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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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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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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One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man.
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If we are true, if we can love, if we have vision, if we can have courage, we can, we should, we ought to, we will.
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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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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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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The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
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The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled .. (they) helped the community live though one more darkness, with eyes wide open, and with hearts set alight.
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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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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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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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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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