Ben Okri Quotes

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

Ben Okri

#2. Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.

Ben Okri

#3. 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

#4. We ought to step out of our old, hard casing. We think that we are one kind of people, when in fact we are always creating ourselves. We are not fixed. We are constantly becoming, constantly coming into being.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#6. This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories.

Ben Okri

#7. 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

#8. Storytellers ought not be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys.

Ben Okri

#9. An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#11. 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.

Ben Okri

#12. 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.

Ben Okri

#13. 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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#16. 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

#17. The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#19. 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

#20. 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.

Ben Okri

#21. The poem is never complete in the mind. It emerges, and then it's like an act of unveiling. The unveiling is the longest and most difficult part of it.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#25. 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.

Ben Okri

#26. 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

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

Ben Okri

#28. 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.

Ben Okri

#29. 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

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#34. Nothing is more difficult than knowing what you really think.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#36. Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

Ben Okri

#37. The worst time was 1983. Love and life and everything went wrong. I reached absolute rock bottom. I saw the Minotaur at the bottom of the abyss. I learnt of the harshness of the world and its impartiality to human failure.

Ben Okri

#38. The only power that black people have is their hunger.

Ben Okri

#39. 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

#40. 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.

Ben Okri

#41. 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.

Ben Okri

#42. At the heart of 'The Famished Road' is a philosophical conundrum - for me, an essential one: what is reality? Everybody's reality is subjective; it's conditioned by upbringing, ideas, temperament, religion, what's happened to you.

Ben Okri

#43. We never think that our mothers will die. It was like suddenly an abyss opened at my feet - I was standing on nothing. It was the strangest thing. Her passing away ripped the solidity out of the world.

Ben Okri

#44. 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.

Ben Okri

#45. I was going to be a scientist.

Ben Okri

#46. 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

#47. Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power.

Ben Okri

#48. But to hear Mozart in a bombed city: how much more beautiful it sounds, as if it were composed to somehow soothe the ruins, to promise a wiser future rising from the rubble.

Ben Okri

#49. I know that human beings are capable of anything.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#51. 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

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

Ben Okri

#53. a dream can be the highest point of a life

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#57. 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

#58. 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' had a formative effect on me. I think it's one of those works that if you encounter it very early you're doubly enchanted by the beauty of the language and the strangeness of the vision. It stays with you.

Ben Okri

#59. You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#61. 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

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#64. A tolerable hell is better than an impossible heaven.

Ben Okri

#65. 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

#66. His mind had been unhinged by the blast of detonators, nights spent with corpses and by the superstitious incredulity of having killed so many white men.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#68. 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

#69. The antimony on their features was set on silvery fire by the intensity of the moon. And their bodies, solid and quivering and half-naked, were like ancient memories of a mystical time without boundaries when it was possible to enter the consciousness of a cornseed and foretell the harvest to come.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#71. So long as a canvas is empty its potential is infinite ... The empty canvas can become a gateway into the landscape of nightmares or a vision of sensual bliss.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#73. One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man.

Ben Okri

#74. The dead shook off their rust of living and seized up steel. Their lips quivered with the defiance of innocents, with manipulations of politicians and their interchangeable dreams, and with the insanity of thugs who don't even know for which parties they commit their atrocities.

Ben Okri

#75. In a world where no one listens, where no one seems to care, where hatred is greater than love, where hearts are hardened by vengeance and pride, where violence is preferable to peace, what else is there for him to do but heal the wounded, and bury the dead, in a war that could go on forever?

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#77. I mean we desperately wanted to be in love with something or other. We were lonely people. It seemed more sensible to fall in love with another person who also wanted to fall in love, than to love a chair or a cat or an idea.

Ben Okri

#78. 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.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#80. If You Look Too Deeply Everything Breaks Your Heart.

Ben Okri

#81. 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.

Ben Okri

#82. The school-children were in their uniforms. A cock crowed repeatedly. Mum got her tray together. I was ready for school. Mum went down the street, swaying, moving a little sleepily, with one more burden added to her life. She was merely a detail in the poverty of our area.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#87. We are victims of censorship within when we do not let ourselves think the thoughts which our flesh recoils from, or let conscience speak that which the heart feels to be unacceptable, or when we give ourselves excellent reasons for not participating in this grand drama of our interconnected lives.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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.

Ben Okri

#95. He felt there had to be 'something'. He felt human beings must create, each in their own way, and that it was only by the application of vision, only by making things, that we could transform the negative 'nothing'.

Ben Okri

#96. inverse of the word live is evil.

Ben Okri

#97. The only power poor people have is their hunger.

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

#99. I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.

Ben Okri

#100. 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