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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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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Wholeness
Ruined
Broken
Ought
Enemy
Artist
Way

More quotes by 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.
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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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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 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.
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We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.
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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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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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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.
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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'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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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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.
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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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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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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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.
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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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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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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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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