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
good hearing people seeing study time
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.
people healthy stories
People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
fighting people share
I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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.
people
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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.
belongs people time understand
I don't think I can make people understand what my writing is about. That really belongs to time and the individual.
best call higher state takes
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.
became
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.
art politics
Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible.
allowed everybody kids stories
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.
essential happened reality religion
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.
absolute bottom human learnt life love reached rock saw time worst
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.
act acts builds castles civilization material mind raw takes
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.