Ben Okri
Ben Okri
Ben Okri OBE FRSLis a Nigerian poet and novelist. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez...
NationalityNigerian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth15 March 1959
CountryNigeria
art creativity impossible
Creativity is the art of the impossible
fathers-day courage adversity
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.
fighting people pace
There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy... But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason... A love, inspired, it seems, by the gods, which it is impossible to fight, distort, destroy, or weaken. In fact, the attempts to destroy such loves only strengthen them. And to do nothing allows them to continue to grow at their natural pace, inexoribly, till this love becomes a wide and silent adoration.
mad silence stories
Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
art magic
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
ghetto imagination vibrancy
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.
karma simple law
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
real soul weight
It may be that what you could be haunts you. It is real. It is a weight you have to carry around. Each failure to become, to be, is a weight. Each state you could inhabit is a burden as heavy as any physical weight, but more so, because it weighs on your soul. It is the ghost of your possibilities hanging around your neck, an invisible albatros, potentials unknowingly murdered.
past together jazz
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
life running reality
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.
night self water
It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of your mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
belief situation
To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
grows
This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
magic attention common
The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.