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The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Grow
Lions
Hair
Joyful
Grows
Wilderness
Gone
Wander
Earth
Skin
Long
Skins
Stoop
Sake
Stoops
Sorrow
Lion

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Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
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Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.
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she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.
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All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
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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.
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She had always wanted words, she loved them grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
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There was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away, put me in prison, but I will know [her] when we are old.
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He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.
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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.
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There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
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One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
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Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half-naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
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I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
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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.
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A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
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He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.
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Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.
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How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
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A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
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It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
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