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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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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Self
Answers
Background
Existence
Whereas
Religion
Backgrounds
Evil
Bounds
Art
Claims
Live
Answer
Referential
Human
Certainly
Traditionally
Humans
Beyond
Secular

More quotes by Yann Martel

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My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
Yann Martel
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Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.
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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
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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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Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.
Yann Martel
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A realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.
Yann Martel
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My greatest wish - other than salvation - was to have a book.
Yann Martel
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A movie tends to box you in, at least as far as the aesthetics. You have an incredibly kinetic experience, which is the joy of cinema.
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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My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.
Yann Martel
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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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I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.
Yann Martel
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Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited.
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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Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.
Yann Martel
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science can only take you so far and then you have to leap
Yann Martel
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If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
Yann Martel
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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
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Religion is just an alternate way of reading reality - you read material reality, and then you add on an extra layer of religiosity that deepens that understanding of reality. Some countries have lost that capacity, or dismissed it or marginalized it.
Yann Martel
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To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity.
Yann Martel