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I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Altered
Loved
Thought

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
Michael Ondaatje
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The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
Michael Ondaatje
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How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
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
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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.
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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To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
Michael Ondaatje
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There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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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
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There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.
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 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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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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That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
Michael Ondaatje
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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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People don't write about kids you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.
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