Quote

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

Yann Martel

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Fields
Cold
Words
Understand
Sprites
Trying
Toads
Muddy
Field
Dancing

More quotes by Yann Martel

Image
Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.
Yann Martel
Image
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
Image
Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.
Yann Martel
Image
The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.
Yann Martel
Image
I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say Oh, I don't read much fiction, as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.
Yann Martel
Image
You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it wont be for long.
Yann Martel
Image
...animals don't escape from somewhere but from something
Yann Martel
Image
People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar. We need that in our lives, the mix of the new and the old. But of course I'm flattered about the comparison with Old man and the sea. Hemingway is a great writer.
Yann Martel
Image
The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions.
Yann Martel
Image
I can only tell my story, what you believe is up to you.
Yann Martel
Image
If you take two steps towards God,' he used to tell me, 'God runs to you!
Yann Martel
Image
It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.
Yann Martel
Image
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.
Yann Martel
Image
How does one say in the jargon of musicology that my sould was pulled out of me and thrown up in the air, to be tossed about by the music. How does one say that I breathed, that I existed, in harmony with the ups and downs of those notes. What kind of notes both elevate and cast down, exalt and crush?
Yann Martel
Image
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
Image
To me, the research is a way of exploring what it means to be alive.
Yann Martel
Image
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
Image
Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness--how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!
Yann Martel
Image
Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
Yann Martel
Image
[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