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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
Broken
Ought
Enemy
Artist
Way
Wholeness
Ruined

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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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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.
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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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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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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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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.
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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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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 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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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
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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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