Okri's Quotes: top 71 famous quotes about Okri's

Okri's Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Okri's quotes, sayings and quotations 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. — Ben Okri

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

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

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

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

Nothing is more difficult than knowing what you really think. — Ben Okri

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

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

We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right. — Ben Okri

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

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

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide. — Ben Okri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The greatest religions convert the world through stories. — Ben Okri

The only power that black people have is their hunger. — Ben Okri

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

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

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

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

An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness. — Ben Okri

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. — Ben Okri

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

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 ... — Ben Okri

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. — Ben Okri

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

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

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

inverse of the word live is evil. — Ben Okri

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

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

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

If You Look Too Deeply Everything Breaks Your Heart. — Ben Okri

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. — Ben Okri

a dream can be the highest point of a life — Ben Okri

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

The only power poor people have is their hunger. — Ben Okri

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible. — Ben Okri

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

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. — Ben Okri

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

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

A tolerable hell is better than an impossible heaven. — Ben Okri

I was going to be a scientist. — Ben Okri

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

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

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

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

I know that human beings are capable of anything. — Ben Okri

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

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

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. — Ben Okri

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

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

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

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

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

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