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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

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Story
Guides
Perfect
Madness
True
Line
Stories
Walk
Great
Walks
Teller
Mind
Hell
Lines
Guide
Clear
Silver

More quotes by Ben Okri

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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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Beware of the stories you read or tell subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
Ben Okri
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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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.
Ben Okri
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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
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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
Ben Okri
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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.
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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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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Creativity is the art of the impossible
Ben Okri
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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.
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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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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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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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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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
Ben Okri
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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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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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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