Quote

A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

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
Sometimes
Must
Men
Drunkenness
Life
Necessary
Drink
Hold
Difficult
Able

More quotes by Ben Okri

Image
I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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
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
Image
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
Ben Okri
Image
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
Image
Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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
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
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
Ben Okri
Image
I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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
To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. ... That's what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.
Ben Okri
Image
We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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
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
To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
Ben Okri
Image
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
Ben Okri
Image
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.
Ben Okri
Image
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
Ben Okri
Image
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
Ben Okri