Ben Okri
Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.Collection: Artist
Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.Collection: Asylums
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.Collection: Reading
Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories.Collection: Stories
This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.Collection: Stories
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. Dickens characters are Nigerians.Collection: Country
Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.Collection: Reading