A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick.

— Ben Okri

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories, we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.

— Ben Okri

Do you know what the luckiest thing is?’‘No.’‘It is to be at home everywhere.

— Ben Okri

He thought about how the camera makes one fall in love with an image of oneself, and perpetuates a false reality.

— 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 love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you.

— 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

In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change or lives.

— Ben Okri

I noticed that in a corner, across from where they ate with such innocent relish, sitting forlorn and abandoned, was the ghost of their son. He had lost both of his arms, one side of his face was squashed, and both his eyes had burst. He had bluish wings. Furthermore, he was the saddest ghost in the house.

— Ben Okri

Knowledge of self ought to be the great project of our lives. Knowing ourselves we will know others. Only by knowing ourselves can we begin to undo the madness we unleash on the world in our wars, our destruction of the environment, our divisions, our desire to dominate others, the poverty we create and exploit. Only through self-knowledge can we reverse the damage we do with all the worldly knowledge we have, which has been only a higher ignorance.

— Ben Okri