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
law police world
The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
stories world converting
The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
dream real world
We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.
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.
suffering world realizing
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.
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.
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.
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.
opened passing ripped standing strangest suddenly
We never think that our mothers will die. It was like suddenly an abyss opened at my feet - I was standing on nothing. It was the strangest thing. Her passing away ripped the solidity out of the world.