Ben Okri quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ben Okri

Ben Okri Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Ben Okri on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

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

TWars are not fought on battlegrounds but in a space smaller than the head of a needle.

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

Fire is one of my temperaments. It is behind all my work ... Fire is a chemical presence.

Nothing is more difficult than knowing what you really think.

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

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

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

It is easier to get lost within sight of the palace. [ ... ] Hope makes all things near, and so can prove treacherous.

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

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

Her eyes were narrowed as if they were endlessly trying to exclude most of what they saw.

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

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.

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

I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you.

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

Some of my reactions are very Nigerian. I still believe that words are things.

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

The greatest religions convert the world through stories.

The only power that black people have is their hunger.

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

Home can be the friend you have been searching for all your life or the person you met once very briefly.

It was a night replaying its corrosive recurrence on the road of our lives, on the road which was hungry for great transformations.

You cannot come to a Nigerian restaurant without having pepper soup.

An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.

He had to learn how not to let his eyes be bewildered by manifestations, and thereby learn to treat appearances as signs and codes of the interior.

He thought about how the camera makes one fall in love with an image of oneself, and perpetuates a false reality.

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 ...

When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self.

They made me think. Everything has to fight to live. Rats work very hard. If we are not careful they will inherit the earth.

Understanding is a pure glass of water. All great truths have no taste. Hints of sweetness are coloured by the need for amazement.

That's good. Life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer," was Dad's reply.

inverse of the word live is evil.

Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.

Do you know what the luckiest thing is?'
'No.'
'It is to be at home everywhere.

Don't fear. You will always have something to struggle for, even if it is beauty or joy.

If You Look Too Deeply Everything Breaks Your Heart.

I study people all the time. For some reason, we're not very good at seeing what's there or hearing what we're hearing.

a dream can be the highest point of a life

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

The only power poor people have is their hunger.

When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.

I learned that life will go through changes - up and down and up again. It's what life does.

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

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

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

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

Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible.

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

I became a sceptic of one way of seeing the world. And I think it is what started me in my awareness that any worldview is superstitious.

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

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

A tolerable hell is better than an impossible heaven.

I was going to be a scientist.

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

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.

People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.

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

I know that human beings are capable of anything.

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

When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.

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.

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

If I don't say the thought right I might destroy it.

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

Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.

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

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