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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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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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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.
Ben Okri
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Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.
Ben Okri
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I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.
Ben Okri
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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
Ben Okri
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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
Ben Okri
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
Ben Okri
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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
Ben Okri
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When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they
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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
Ben Okri
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
Ben Okri