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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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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
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Novelist
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University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
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More quotes by Michael Ondaatje
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
Michael Ondaatje
Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
Michael Ondaatje
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.
Michael Ondaatje
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
All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
Michael Ondaatje
I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
Michael Ondaatje
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
How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
Michael Ondaatje
Politically I also 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. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction.
Michael Ondaatje
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
I promised to tell you how one falls in love.
Michael Ondaatje
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
Michael Ondaatje
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
Michael Ondaatje
So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.
Michael Ondaatje
Sadness is very close to hate.
Michael Ondaatje
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
Michael Ondaatje
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
I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.
Michael Ondaatje
Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
Michael Ondaatje
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
