A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.

Against these analyses Okri has always rejected the categorization of his work as magical realism claiming that this categorization is the result of laziness on the part of critics and likening this categorization to the observation that "a horse. His literary influences include Aesop's Fables Arabian Nights Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions and has been compared favorably with authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez.