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My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Life
Ambition
Mori
Like
Painting
Memento
Side
Grinning
Sides
Skull
Art
Skulls
Human
Remind
Humans
European
Always
Folly

More quotes by 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.
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My greatest wish - other than salvation - was to have a book.
Yann Martel
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As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.
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My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?
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When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
Yann Martel
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Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life.
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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I cannot think of a better way to spread the faith. No thundering from a pulpit, no condemnation from bad churches, no peer pressure, just a book of scripture quietly waiting to say hello, as gentle and powerful as a little girl's kiss on your cheek.
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Religion is more than rite and ritual.
Yann Martel
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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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How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.
Yann Martel
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It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
Yann Martel
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Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
Yann Martel
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Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.
Yann Martel
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I chose the name Pi because it's an irrational number (one with no discernable pattern). Yet scientists use this irrational number to come to a rational understanding of the universe. To me, religion is a bit like that, irrational yet with it we come together we come to a sound understanding of the universe.
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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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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The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
Yann Martel
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[The taxidermist is] a historian, dealing with an animal's past the zookeeper is a politician, dealing with an animal's present and everyone else is a citizen who must decide on that animal's future (...) The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.
Yann Martel