Ben Okri Quotes

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.

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.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

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

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

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.

A man's greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.

I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.

This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.

We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.

I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.

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.

Creativity is the art of the impossible

Maybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

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.

Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you've got left is your belief in the imagination.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.

An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.

I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends' floors, was happy, was miserable.

The greatest religions convert the world through stories.

I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.

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.

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.

a dream can be the highest point of a life

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

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

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.

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.

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.

If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.

A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.

I know that human beings are capable of anything.

I was going to be a scientist.

Don't read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.

If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft

To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.