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I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Forget
Spend
Forgetting
Faces
Married
Signs
May
Says
Sins
Look
Week
Weeks
Looks
Wife
Desert
Never
Days
Spent
Men
Looking
Sin
Face
Moon
Omission

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.
Michael Ondaatje
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Death means you are in the third person.
Michael Ondaatje
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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
Michael Ondaatje
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Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.
Michael Ondaatje
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The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.
Michael Ondaatje
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Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
Michael Ondaatje
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I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.
Michael Ondaatje
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A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.
Michael Ondaatje
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How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.
Michael Ondaatje
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When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.
Michael Ondaatje
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A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
Michael Ondaatje
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We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
Michael Ondaatje
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I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.
Michael Ondaatje
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You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
Michael Ondaatje
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It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.
Michael Ondaatje
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Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
Michael Ondaatje
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There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
Michael Ondaatje
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Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
Michael Ondaatje
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I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
Michael Ondaatje
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There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
Michael Ondaatje