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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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Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Hands
Two
Everything
Precision
Writing
Involve
Trying
Thirds
Think
Reader
Thinking
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Hand
More quotes by Michael Ondaatje
I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.
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
The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
Michael Ondaatje
I want the marginality to come into the center. This is the thing I was conscious of growing up, when I later lived in England. I saw all these war movies that came out shortly after the war, and they were all about the war being fought by Englishmen or Americans, there were no other allies in it - from India or Australia, etc.
Michael Ondaatje
I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
Michael Ondaatje
Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.
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
I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.
Michael Ondaatje
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
Michael Ondaatje
Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are? ...But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? ...Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.
Michael Ondaatje
Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
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
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
So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.
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 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
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
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
Michael Ondaatje
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