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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.

Ben Okri

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Around
Square
Squares
Evening
Held
Smile
Felt
Order

More quotes by Ben Okri

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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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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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.
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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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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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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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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.
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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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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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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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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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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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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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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.
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.
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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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