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If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Living
Hard
Believe
Love
Stumble
Mere
Belief

More quotes by Yann Martel

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We are all born like Catholics, aren't we—in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?
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Most of us get our history through story.
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There's no peace like the peace of an inner courtyard on a sunny day.
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You can get used to anything - haven't I already said that? Isn't that what all survivors say?
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In a movie, you need good actors, whereas in a book, you don't, unless you have a really bad imagination. In a book, your imagination will do the acting for you. Also, the process of revelation is often different. Tension is achieved in a different way.
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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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Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
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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.
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If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
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Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.
Yann Martel
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If you don't have dreams, how do you maneuver reality? Where do you get the ideas to change reality if not from dreams?
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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I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
Yann Martel
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My greatest wish - other than salvation - was to have a book.
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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It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.
Yann Martel
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I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
Yann Martel
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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
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I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.
Yann Martel
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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?
Yann Martel