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Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
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More quotes by 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
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Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?
Yann Martel
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Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
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's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.
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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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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You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!
Yann Martel
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Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.
Yann Martel
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The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
Yann Martel
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Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. They prove to be the ones most faithful to them…it is a fact commonly known in the trade.
Yann Martel
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Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team.
Yann Martel
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Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.
Yann Martel
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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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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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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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The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.
Yann Martel
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We believe what we see.’...What do you do when you’re in the dark?
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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I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.
Yann Martel