Author Profile
Ben Okri
1959 • Nigerian • Poet
48
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 48 quotesHome can be the friend you have been searching for all your life or the person you met once very briefly.— Ben Okri
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.— Ben Okri
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.— Ben Okri
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.— Ben Okri
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.— Ben Okri
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.— Ben Okri
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.— Ben Okri
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.— Ben Okri
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.— Ben Okri
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.— 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 in secret.— Ben Okri
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.— Ben Okri
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.— Ben Okri