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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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Beware of the stories you read or tell subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
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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The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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 neglect the gold in your own back yard.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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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.
Ben Okri
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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
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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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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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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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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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 earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled .. (they) helped the community live though one more darkness, with eyes wide open, and with hearts set alight.
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