Ben Okri

“Will you be at the harvest, Among the gatherers of new fruits? Then you must begin today to remake Your mental and…

— Ben Okri

Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you've got…

— Ben Okri

“The highest kind of writing—which must not be confused with the most ambitious kind…belongs to the realm of grace. Talent is part…

— Ben Okri

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We…

— Ben Okri

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all…

— Ben Okri

People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.

— Ben Okri

It may be that what you could be haunts you. It is real. It is a weight you have to carry around.…

— Ben Okri

This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.

— Ben Okri

Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of…

— Ben Okri

Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming…

— Ben Okri

We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of…

— Ben Okri

Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works…

— Ben Okri

The worst time was 1983. Love and life and everything went wrong. I reached absolute rock bottom. I saw the Minotaur at…

— Ben Okri

Home can be the friend you have been searching for all your life or the person you met once very briefly.

— Ben Okri

“Will you be at the harvest, Among the gatherers of new fruits?”

— Ben Okri

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

— Ben Okri

“The intelligence that shaped the universe, shaped you. There is an inner part of us, for ever obscured, for ever mysterious, which…

— Ben Okri

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only…

— Ben Okri

A man's greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.

— Ben Okri

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.

— Ben Okri

“Her legend, which would sprout a thousand hallucinations, had been born in our midst – born of stories and rumours which, in…

— Ben Okri

I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories…

— Ben Okri

Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing…

— Ben Okri

Don't read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.

— Ben Okri

“I became my grief. I wept in advance for all the things that would happen, the unimaginable things beyond the horizon of…

— Ben Okri