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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.

Ben Okri

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Sustain
Situations
Completely
Quite
Situation
Belief
Something
Undermine

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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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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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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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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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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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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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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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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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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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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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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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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I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing 'Famished Road,' which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on I had to change it.
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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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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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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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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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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