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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

Ben Okri

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Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Tradition
Ought
Humanity
Art
Visionary
Three
Visionaries
Traditions
Realistic
Wild

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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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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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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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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 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'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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One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
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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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When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
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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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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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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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This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
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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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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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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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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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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 am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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