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When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in.

Ben Okri

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
World
Begin
Realize
Realizing
Create
Imagine
Suffering
Rather
Live
Prefer

More quotes by 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.
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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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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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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
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Our time here is magic! It's the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It's the only space.
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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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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
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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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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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 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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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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
Ben Okri
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Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
Ben Okri
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
Ben Okri