Ben Okri Quotes

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult if I'm not sure where the story is going.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

Novel writing is solitary work.

I used to think that: whenever I heard that someone had taken 10 years to write a novel, I'd think it must be a big, serious book. Now I think, 'No - it took you one year to write, and nine years to sit around eating Kit Kats.'

Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch.

Short fiction isn't my natural form. It's taken a lot of work over the years to finally feel more comfortable writing stories under 80,000 words!

I would say, number one, don't worry about getting published. Just write. Number two, just write. Three is make sure you read.

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

I've sat down and written with a more or less supportable or insupportable idea or thing to say, and it ends. When it's not 200 pages, people want to call it a story. I guess they're entitled to do that. In my view, if it were a supportable idea, it would have gone 200 pages, and it didn't.

I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.

Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.'

Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.

I don't want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of writing. It's rather like a pressure cooker with a certain amount of pressure in it - the more you let out, the less you cook.

Get your butt in a chair and write. If it comes out weak or bad or clunky or ordinary, then accept that this happens to everyone. Everyone. Get it down, get it done, and fix it in the rewrite. Just like everyone from Stephen King to J. K. Rowling to Chuck Palahniuk does.

Writing - not being a writer with interesting habits - gets priority.

I'm very interested in writing - it just takes so much discipline, whether it's short stories or novels.

I write - and then I write some more.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

Just being able to get paid to do something you love is a wonderful thing. That said, a writer's daily routine, unless you're Dominick Dunne, isn't exactly glamorous. Much of it amounts to drudgery, staring at a computer screen all day in a room by yourself, juggling nouns and verbs to make a demanding editor happy.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

Unfortunately, I don't get to read nearly as much as I want because I'm always working on my own stuff, either the novels or newspaper columns.