Quote

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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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Higher
Imagination
Secret
Greater
Artist
Gestures
Fewer
Tools
Failure

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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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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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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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The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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.
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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.
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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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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
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The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
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