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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.

Ben Okri

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Come
Rough
Thing
Africa
Kind
Jazz
Like
Strange
Present
Future
Past
Together

More quotes by Ben Okri

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I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.
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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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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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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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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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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 am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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.
Ben Okri
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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
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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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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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