Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet and novelist. He is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions.
Okri published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows in 1980, after which he rose to international acclaim.
Since he debuted his career as an author, he has published quite a number of novels, including –The Famished Road, which won him the 1991 Booker Prize for literature.
Eelive.ng brings you some of his powerful quotes:
- -The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
- 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.
- -The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
- -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.
- -The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
- -Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
- -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.
- -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.
- -Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
- -Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible.
- -I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing ‘Famished Road,’ which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on, I had to change it.
- -If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft.
- -I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
- -It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.
- -I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
- -The poem is never complete in the mind. It emerges, and then it’s like an act of unveiling. The unveiling is the longest and most difficult part of it.
- -The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
- -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.
- -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.
- -Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That’s where stories and poems get their power.
Written by Olusola Oluwatobi
