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Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Facts
Truths
True
Divided
May
Psychological
Real
Easily
Emotional
Beyond
Garland
Fiction
Garlands
Goes
Nonfiction

More quotes by Yann Martel

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I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.
Yann Martel
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A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.
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Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.
Yann Martel
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Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious.
Yann Martel
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If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.
Yann Martel
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Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness.
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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Music moves me - duh - and that is like having a window opening on a heightened reality, but the effect is fleeting: When the music ends, the magic, the uplifting, vanishes and the window slams shut. Words, on the other hand, by the nature of how they work, emotions evoked by dint of carefully laid out thoughts, have a more lingering effect.
Yann Martel
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A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.
Yann Martel
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Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?
Yann Martel
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Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion - and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.
Yann Martel
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I couldn't get Him out of my head. Still can't. I spent three solid days thinking about Him. The more He bothered me, the less I coul forget Him. And the more I learned about Him, the less I wanted to leave Him.
Yann Martel
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Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.
Yann Martel
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But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.
Yann Martel
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If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
Yann Martel
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The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
Yann Martel
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Books, like people, can't be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them.
Yann Martel
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If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.
Yann Martel
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I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.
Yann Martel
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Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.
Yann Martel