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.

We can still astonish the gods in humanityAnd be the stuff of future legends,If we but dare to be real,And have the courage to seeThat this is the time to dreamThe best dream of them all.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted — knowingly or unknowingly — in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’

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.

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