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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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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Chaos
Instruments
Clamorous
Music
Deity
Deities
Eras
Chief
Chiefs
Instrument

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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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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.
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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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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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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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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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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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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 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.
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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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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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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.
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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
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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.
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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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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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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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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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