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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
Two
Everything
Precision
Writing
Involve
Trying
Thirds
Think
Reader
Thinking
Goes
Hand
Hands

More quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
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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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A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
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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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You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
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When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.
Michael Ondaatje
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You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
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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 thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
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Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
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Death means you are in the third person.
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I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.
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As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
Michael Ondaatje
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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.
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It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
Michael Ondaatje
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We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.
Michael Ondaatje
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There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
Michael Ondaatje
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Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
Michael Ondaatje
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I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
Michael Ondaatje
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Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
Michael Ondaatje