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There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
Michael Ondaatje
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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Breaking
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Space
Stories
Writing
People
Thievery
Spaces
More quotes by Michael Ondaatje
Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
Michael Ondaatje
There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
Michael Ondaatje
Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half-naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
Michael Ondaatje
It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
Michael Ondaatje
There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.
Michael Ondaatje
I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
Michael Ondaatje
The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
Michael Ondaatje
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
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
Death means you are in the third person.
Michael Ondaatje
The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.
Michael Ondaatje
It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.
Michael Ondaatje
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
Michael Ondaatje
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
Michael Ondaatje
In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
Michael Ondaatje
I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
Michael Ondaatje
This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
Michael Ondaatje
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
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 desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
Michael Ondaatje
