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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
Speech
Expression
Silence
Ought
Enemy
Painters
Mute
Painter

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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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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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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
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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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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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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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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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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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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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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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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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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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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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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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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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