Ben Okri Quotes

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.

The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.

Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.

When I read, I don't need a character to look like me, act like me, or think like me. I don't need to have my heart broken. I don't need to be surprised or amused or challenged, and I don't need to swoon.

If I could tell every Trump supporter two things, it would be to travel and read a history book. Look beyond yourselves; look at how petty the morals you uphold seem when you realize we are not the only ones.

I want my audiences to be as open-minded as my characters.

A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.

A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

He who closes his ears to the views of others shows little confidence in the integrity of his own views.

What I love about the sci-fi community is that it's the most nonjudgmental, inclusive, diverse environment in the country. There's no group of people that is more diverse and inclusive.

The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.

I guess I see a part of myself in everyone I write about. I tend to write about kids who are obsessed with something, and even though I have never been good with machines the way Hugo is, I did love miniature things when I was a kid.

My conception of my ideal reader has expanded quite a lot as I've matured: Ultimately when I think of my ideal reader, it's someone who's not sitting down with the intention of automatically arguing with the book: somebody who's going to give me enough slack to tell my story.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

With most of the songs and music that I've composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves, making their experience more integral.

I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.

I try to widen the horizons of every child I meet, and part of that is promoting diverse forms, be it graphic novels, stories told in a narrative voice, or more translated books, as well as more diverse writers and more diverse characters.

Kids don't read as much as you'd like them to, just in terms of seeing the world from different perspectives. I mean, that's the great thing about books, still. Here's television, here are the movies, and it's pretty limited in terms of the perspectives.

Anyone who thinks they have a monopoly on truth, and there is only one way to see the world, always gets us into trouble.

I'm challenging everybody on every side of every divide to be more who they are, to cultivate their capacity for awareness.

I've been doing everything I can to reach out and understand why people voted against me. They were trying to send a message. I have to be more sensitive in the way I express myself, and I have to be more thoughtful in the positions I take.