Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Going
Something
Always
Unfinished
Hanging
Scene
Next
Ends
Reason
More quotes by Michael Ondaatje
The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
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
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
It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
Michael Ondaatje
One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
Michael Ondaatje
Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.
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
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
Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
Michael Ondaatje
All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
Michael Ondaatje
Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.
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
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
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
Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.
Michael Ondaatje
I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
Michael Ondaatje
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
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
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
