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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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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Giving
Writing
Farce
People
Anarchy
Causes
Freedom
Write
Kids
Give

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We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
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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.
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There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
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All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
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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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The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion
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It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
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I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
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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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Sadness is very close to hate.
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If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.
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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.
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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.
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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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We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.
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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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Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
Michael Ondaatje
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I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
Michael Ondaatje
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A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
Michael Ondaatje
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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