A Quote by Ben Okri

Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.

Ben Okri

Quote Topics

African Appetite Appetite For Life Characters Country Dickens Dwellers Example Falstaff For Example Ghetto His Life Literature Shakespeare Spirit Very Writer

Quote Author

Ben Okri
Nigerian - Novelist
Born: March 15, 1959

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

W. H. Auden

Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.

Henning Mankell

His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters.

Claire Tomalin

The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters - in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make: their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.

Philip Roth

At his heart, Shakespeare was a YA author. So many of his plays are set with high school-aged characters. He understood the passion, the confusion and drama that marks that life stage.

Eric Walters

My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I'm in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with uncanny animism. But his female characters annoy me.

Michel Faber

After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.

Claire Tomalin

Cultures, when they meet, influence one another, whether people like it or not. But Americans don't have any way of describing this secret that has been going on for more than two hundred years. The intermarriage of the Indian and the African in America, for example, has been constant and thorough. Colin Powell tells us in his autobiography that he is Scotch, Irish, African, Indian, and British, but all we hear is that he is African.

Richard Rodriguez

One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.

Kenneth Branagh

I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks - who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on.

Mark Gatiss

After Nigeria, we are the second biggest black African nation. We are the headquarters of the African Union. We are the only African country that has never been colonized. This is perhaps the last surviving African civilization.

Meles Zenawi

He is absolutely on his own, and we never interfere in any of his decisions. When Ranbir joined the industry, he told his mother that he wanted to portray characters which a boy of his age would do in real life.

Rishi Kapoor

Oh, I love labels, as long as they are numerous. I'm an American writer. I'm a Nigerian writer. I'm a Nigerian American writer. I'm an African writer. I'm a Yoruba writer. I'm an African American writer. I'm a writer who's been strongly influenced by European precedents. I'm a writer who feels very close to literary practice in India - which I go to quite often - and to writers over there.