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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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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Historical
Research
Bigs
Difficult
Light
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More quotes by Michael Ondaatje
Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.
Michael Ondaatje
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
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
Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now.
Michael Ondaatje
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
So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.
Michael Ondaatje
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
Michael Ondaatje
I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love
Michael Ondaatje
She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
Michael Ondaatje
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.
Michael Ondaatje
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
Michael Ondaatje
I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.
Michael Ondaatje
I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.
Michael Ondaatje
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
Michael Ondaatje
He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.
Michael Ondaatje
All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
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
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
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
Michael Ondaatje
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
Michael Ondaatje
