Quote

Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.

Ben Okri

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Ought
Enemy
Painters
Mute
Painter
Speech
Expression
Silence

More quotes by Ben Okri

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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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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I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
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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
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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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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.
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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man.
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To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. ... That's what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.
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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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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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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.
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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.
Ben Okri
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
Ben Okri