Quote

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

Ben Okri

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Ben Okri

Image
Creativity is the art of the impossible
Ben Okri
Image
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
Ben Okri
Image
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
Image
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.
Ben Okri
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
Ben Okri
Image
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
Image
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
Ben Okri
Image
Beware of the stories you read or tell subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
Ben Okri
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
Ben Okri
Image
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.
Ben Okri
Image
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.
Ben Okri
Image
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.
Ben Okri
Image
To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
Ben Okri
Image
Our time here is magic! It's the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It's the only space.
Ben Okri