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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.

Ben Okri

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
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Beauty
Fighting
Success
People

More quotes by Ben Okri

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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
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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
Ben Okri
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
Ben Okri
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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
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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
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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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
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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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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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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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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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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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
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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
Ben Okri
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The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it
Ben Okri
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
Ben Okri