Quotes from Ben Okri

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

To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.

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.

I am one year older than Nigeria at 51. In a human life, 51 might be old. But it is very young for a nation. By that, I mean a Nigeria conscious of itself as a nation.

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.

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' had a formative effect on me. I think it's one of those works that if you encounter it very early you're doubly enchanted by the beauty of the language and the strangeness of the vision. It stays with you.

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

Creativity is the art of the impossible

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

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.

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

Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.

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

Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. di..ens' characters are Nigerians. Do y

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it.

If there is anything better than to be loved it is loving.

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.