Quotes from Ben Okri

I was going to be a scientist.

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.

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.

A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

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.

We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.

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.

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.

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

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.

Fire is one of my temperaments. It is behind all my work... Fire is a chemical presence.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

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.

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

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.

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you've got left is your belief in the imagination.

I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.