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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
Writing
Farce
People
Anarchy
Causes
Freedom
Write
Kids
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Giving
More quotes by Michael Ondaatje
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
Michael Ondaatje
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.
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
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
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
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
Michael Ondaatje
How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
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
As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
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
In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
Michael Ondaatje
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
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
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
Michael Ondaatje
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
Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.
Michael Ondaatje
A novel is a mirror walking down a road
Michael Ondaatje
Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.
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
