Ben Okri Quotes

You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.

I think Shakespeare had a lot to contribute with his understanding of the human condition.

Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'

A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up in the crucible of their days and certainly not always - if ever - capable of articulating their condition.

People are composed of many things, and in my work, what influences me is the complexity of people - the chiaroscuro of dark and light. When I play a strong guy, I try to find, where is he weak? And, conversely, when I play a weak guy, where is he strong?

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

I think I am more attracted to characters with a subtext, whatever that is and they don't necessarily have to be virtuous, but they have to at least be human.

The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.

Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul? Man is a great depth, O Lord. The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart.

What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff about us as human beings.

Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

We all have dark sides to ourselves, and I want to portray that in a realistic way.

I try genuinely, when I'm playing a character, to not judge them and just to inhabit someone as how one sees them. That being said, you also want to make sure that you don't blur the edges of people too much because humans are naughty and complicated beings.

Acting is not rocket science, but it is an art form. What you are doing is illuminating humanity. Or not.

For me, I start at the place that my characters are human. I start at the place that they are onions that are layered and meant to be peeled, just as we as human beings are.

My dad was always interested in characters he didn't understand - he was such a great bad guy in movies. And that is really the thing that calls me to the material often: something I struggle to understand in human behaviour.

If you're going to play human beings, and you're going to play them three-dimensionally, you have to show every side of them.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

However, for my characters to have depth, they have to be human and complex, have both qualities and flaws, do the right things at times, and at others, things they'll regret having done and not necessarily know how to undo.

I like the movies that embrace the complexity of the human condition.

Every character, before they are heroes or villains, they are human beings.

In a non-supernatural universe, there's just character, and it's humanity and human beings and how they relate to each other.

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.

The endings for all my characters seem sufficiently human and messy for me to feel comfortable with them. In some ways they have only moved an inch, but sometimes an inch is a great distance.