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There's more danger in the violence you don't face.

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Face
Faces
Danger
Violence

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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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
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A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
Michael Ondaatje
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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
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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
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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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I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
Michael Ondaatje
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To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
Michael Ondaatje
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So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.
Michael Ondaatje
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Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.
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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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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Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
Michael Ondaatje
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Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
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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Sadness is very close to hate.
Michael Ondaatje
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all this Beethoven and rain
Michael Ondaatje
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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
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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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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.
Michael Ondaatje
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We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.
Michael Ondaatje