A Quote by Ben Okri

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.

Ben Okri

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Allowed Another Dream Else Everybody Everybody Else Had Interested Keep Kids Knew New New One Nigeria Stories Tell Up Were Would

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Ben Okri
Nigerian - Novelist
Born: March 15, 1959

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.

Ben Okri

Each of us is comprised of stories, stories not only about ourselves but stories about ancestors we never knew and people we've never met. We have stories we love to tell and stories we have never told anyone. The extent to which others know us is determined by the stories we choose to share. We extend a deep trust to someone when we say, "I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone." Sharing stories creates trust because through stories we come to a recognition of how much we have in common.

Julius Lester

Stories were primarily verbal to begin with. Before there were cave paintings, stories were told over generations. We tell each other thousands of stories in the course of everyday life.

David Massengill

Everything runs its course. We had told a lot of stories that happened in our life. My kid was getting older, and we were running out of stories to tell.

Howie Mandel

I would love to keep playing roles where I get to inspire young women, and I get to uplift them and tell their stories and tell important stories that haven't been told.

Storm Reid

A lot of people would write to me long stories from their lives, and I felt they were thinking of me as some sort of treasure chest to keep their secrets. I felt like sometimes they would tell me stories they wouldn't tell anybody else in the whole world. And I loved these stories.

Jens Lekman

There are a million ideas in a world of stories. Humans are storytelling animals. Everything's a story, everyone's got stories, we're perceiving stories, we're interested in stories. So to me, the big nut to crack is to how to tell a story, what's the right way to tell a particular story.

Richard Linklater

We have to tell the stories of the everyday Americans who are adversely impacted by these policies. That's how we were able to keep the Affordable Care Act from being repealed. People told their stories; people showed up at Town Hall.

Valerie Jarrett

Our vision is to break the projects into stories that must be told, stories that we would like to tell and stories that people go to movies for. If we can find great scripts that fit these three categories, we will go out and make a movie.

Ronnie Screwvala

Life is a story. You and I are telling stories; they may suck, but we are telling stories. And we tell stories about the things that we want. So you go through your bank account, and those are things you have told stories about.

Donald Miller

As an artist, I am interested in telling stories that haven't been told before, stories that are going to affect people, and also stories that shine light on areas of history that haven't had light shined on them before.

Naomie Harris

My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain point, I had a tendency to make up my own elementary variations on stories I had heard, or to invent totally new ones.

Wole Soyinka

This is my life - I want to tell stories. There is something huge inside me that pushes me to tell stories, and tell stories for an audience and everybody.

Dario Argento

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.

Grace Paley

The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.

James Carroll

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

Niall Williams

A Quote by Ben Okri

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