Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Sunlight
Dressers
Lady
Balcony
Photographer
Balconies
Naked
Sofa
Dog
Sofas
Window
Snap
Half
Snaps
Next
Orleans
Dresser

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

Image
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
Image
As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
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
Image
Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
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
Image
So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
The music of Gavin Bryars falls under no category. It is mongrel, full of sensuality and wit and is deeply moving. He is one of the few composers who can put slapstick and primal emotion alongside each other. He allows you to witness new wonders in the sounds around you by approaching them from a completely new angle. With a third ear maybe.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out
Michael Ondaatje
Image
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.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
A novel is a mirror walking down a road
Michael Ondaatje
Image
There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
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
Image
All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
Michael Ondaatje
Image
Politically I 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.
Michael Ondaatje