A Quote by Ben Okri
The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
Related Quotes
Desire is both imitative (we like what others like) and competitive (we want to take away from others what they have). As children, we wanted to monopolize the attention of a parent, to draw it away from other siblings. This sense of rivalry... makes people compete for the attention.
I'm very glad I'm not a politician. I think it's one step away from the gates of hell, being a politician. I really do. It`s a nightmare.
Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.
What I would say to young women is: Pay attention to the real. Pay attention to what you're really thirsting for. What do you really want? And I think that's much harder to decipher in a culture that has no interest in it. What interests me is, are we going to wake in time? Are human beings going to wake up to ourselves, to the incredible poverty that's on this planet, to what we're doing to the earth, to what we're doing to women, to what we're doing to boys? That's what's important.
Dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively. We haven't really paid much attention to thought as a process. We have engaged in thoughts, put we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process. Why does thought require attention? Everything requires attention, really. If we ran machines without paying attention to them, they would break down. Our thought, too, is a process, and it requires attention, otherwise its going to go wrong.
You can't be both a writer and a politician, at least not a good writer. A writer must always tell the truth as he sees it. And the politician must never give the game away.
I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.
It really doesn't take brains to be a politician as much as it takes stomach. Both would be nice, but in America we have accepted diminishing returns in this arena.
Presidents don't have power. Their job is to draw attention away from it.
You don't write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you're really doing it, that's all you're doing: writing.
Our fear of not mattering much has the potential to draw us away from what matters most.
I don't draw attention to myself or have security pushing people away.
Serious relationships draw us away from the circle of friends that seemed so adequate, so fulfilling. Marriage cements these inward movements. Children draw partners closer, but they can also draw you further away from the friends and lives you once knew.
Life itself has so much politics, why should I make it my profession? I'm just a politician's son, not a politician myself. Two politicians, that's my dad and elder brother, in the family are enough. I'm happy doing my own stuff in Bollywood.
It's often been said that you learn more from losing than you do from winning. I think, if you're wise, you learn from both. You learn a lot from a loss. You learn what is it that we're not doing to get to where we want to go. It really gets your attention and it really motivates the work ethic of your team when you're not doing well.
Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist