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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
Humans
Beyond
Secular
Self
Answers
Background
Existence
Whereas
Religion
Backgrounds
Evil
Bounds
Art
Claims
Live
Answer
Referential
Human
Certainly
Traditionally

More quotes by 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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I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It's a terrible burden to carry. All sentient life is sacred.
Yann Martel
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Most of us get our history through story.
Yann Martel
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The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea.
Yann Martel
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At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.
Yann Martel
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It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.
Yann Martel
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If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?
Yann Martel
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The presence of God is the finest of rewards.
Yann Martel
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How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter?
Yann Martel
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India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it.
Yann Martel
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In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.
Yann Martel
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Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.
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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My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.
Yann Martel
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I'm not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don't have a mobile. I just don't need things. I don't like things.
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.
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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I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.
Yann Martel
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Christianity is a religion in a rush. Look at the world created in seven says. Even on a symbolic lovel, that's creation in frenzy.
Yann Martel
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When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite.
Yann Martel