Ben Okri

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

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

You cannot come to a Nigerian restaurant without having pepper soup.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I believe in leavening. You can't have words sticking out too much, like promontories. They disturb the density. You have to flatten them, or raise the surrounding terrain.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

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

I was going to be a scientist.

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.

Some of my reactions are very Nigerian. I still believe that words are things.

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.

To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.