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So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Came
Interesting
Involvement
Understand
Strangers
Lives
Stranger
Without
Pass
Important
Large
Thing
Personal
Would
Small

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It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.
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Politically I don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country.
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Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.
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There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.
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A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
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We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
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How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
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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.
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Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
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Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.
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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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...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
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This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
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All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
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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.
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What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
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You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
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As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
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I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
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Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.
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