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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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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Dickens
Shakespeare
London
Went
Literature
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More quotes by Ben Okri

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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
Ben Okri
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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
Ben Okri
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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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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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In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
Ben Okri
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The road will never swallow you. The river of destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.
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.
Ben Okri
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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
Ben Okri
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
Ben Okri
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
Ben Okri
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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.
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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
Ben Okri
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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
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri