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I turned around, stepped over the Zebra and threw myself overboard.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Zebra
Zebras
Overboard
Stepped
Threw
Turned
Around

More quotes by Yann Martel

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The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?
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Christianity is a religion in a rush. Look at the world created in seven says. Even on a symbolic lovel, that's creation in frenzy.
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Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born.
Yann Martel
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Most people take who they are, naturally, as a given, and they're interested in the sexual other, but not in being the sexual other. Most men are interested in women - whether sexually or not is not the question - but they don't necessarily want to be a woman.
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Religion is more than rite and ritual.
Yann Martel
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In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.
Yann Martel
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Truth is a nebulous thing. There are certain, definite truths, but the truth of our lives goes far beyond facts.
Yann Martel
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Just beyond the ticket booth Father had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain. There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the curtain that we had to replace it regularly. Behind it was a mirror.
Yann Martel
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I was not wounded in any part of my body, but I had never experienced such intense pain, such a ripping of the nerves, such an ache of the heart.
Yann Martel
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Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food is low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured.
Yann Martel
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Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.
Yann Martel
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If you don't have dreams, how do you maneuver reality? Where do you get the ideas to change reality if not from dreams?
Yann Martel
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Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.
Yann Martel
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Dawn came and matters were worse for it. Because now, emerging from the darkness, I could see, what before I had only felt, the great curtains of rain crashing down on me from towering heights and the waves that threw a path over me and trod me underfoot one after another.
Yann Martel
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I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.
Yann Martel
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I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.
Yann Martel
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It is a vast country, so that inspires you. It's also the greatest hotel on earth: It welcomes people from everywhere. It's a good country to write from because in many ways Canada is the world.
Yann Martel
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What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences.
Yann Martel
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My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
Yann Martel
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Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans.
Yann Martel