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
people
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
giving age stories
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.’
art poison stories
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
book reading writing
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.
dream mean reality
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
writing reader
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.
squares order your-smile
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
ocean people stories
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.
rivers world hungry
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.
dream spiritual art
Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.
soul stories three
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.
dream destiny childhood
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
perfection hints stories
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
art humanity three
There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.