Nigerian - Poet | March 15, 1959 -
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
BeautifulBestYouToo MuchGrowing
I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
SuccessBeautyMyselfI AmPeople
You cannot come to a Nigerian restaurant without having pepper soup.
SoupRestaurantYouWithoutCome
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.
LifeI AmYearYoungMeanHuman
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.
LifeLoveFailureTimeWorldWrong
Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power.
PowerYouDreamRealDreamingGet
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
FearHeartConquerYouKnowBigger
To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
BeliefThroughSomethingYourQuite
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.
ChangeStressWritingRoadLongOut
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.
CreativeWritingBookReadingSee
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
HumanityMeanHumanFictionVery
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.
YouDreamNewSeeTellUp
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