Ben Okri quotes

Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet and novelist renowned for his works blending magical realism and African storytelling traditions. His acclaimed novel "The Famished Road" won the Booker Prize and brought global recognition to his unique literary style. He continues to inspire readers with his explorations of identity, spirituality, and social issues. Here are 42 of his quotes:

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

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

Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri

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

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

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

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

Ben Okri

a dream can be the highest point of a life.

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

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

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

Ben Okri

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

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

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

Ben Okri

The greatest religions convert the world through stories.

Ben Okri

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

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

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

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

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