Quote

...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Sometimes
Thirds
Save
Protect
Within
Voice
Protects
Art
Hide
Persons
Enter
Person
Third

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
Michael Ondaatje
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Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.
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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There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.
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 writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
Michael Ondaatje
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I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
Michael Ondaatje
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I want the marginality to come into the center. This is the thing I was conscious of growing up, when I later lived in England. I saw all these war movies that came out shortly after the war, and they were all about the war being fought by Englishmen or Americans, there were no other allies in it - from India or Australia, etc.
Michael Ondaatje
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A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
Michael Ondaatje
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As someone who writes novels that are often set in other periods of time or other ages or other landscapes, there's a certain element of research I have to do, and often, the more laconic people are, the more interesting they become.
Michael Ondaatje
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Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
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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I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love
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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It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
Michael Ondaatje
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What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.
Michael Ondaatje
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In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
Michael Ondaatje
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I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.
Michael Ondaatje
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Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
Michael Ondaatje