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Home
Authors
Ben Okri
Nigerian
Poet
About the author
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.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Love
#Suffering
I was going to be a scientist.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends' floors, was happy, was miserable.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Friends
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Home
#London
#Literature
#Shakespeare
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.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Despair
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Humanity
#Fiction
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Art
#Nothing
#Magic
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.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Will
#Imagination
#Failure
#Artist
#Tools
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.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Time
#Space
#Potential
The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#World
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Fact
#Imperfection
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.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Wonder
#World
#Law
#Police
#Legislators
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Heart
#Fear
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.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Writing
#Reading
#Act
Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Art
#Creativity
#Politics
The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Attention
You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
Ben Okri,
Nigerian
Poet
#Kids
#Dream