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.

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

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.

I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends' floors, was happy, was miserable.

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible.

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.

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.

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

The worst time was 1983. Love and life and everything went wrong. I reached absolute rock bottom. I saw the Minotaur at the bottom of the abyss. I learnt of the harshness of the world and its impartiality to human failure.

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.

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

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.

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.

I learned that life will go through changes - up and down and up again. It's what life does.

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

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

The greatest religions convert the world through stories.

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

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 was going to be a scientist.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.