Quote

Life is an interpretation of a series of facts, and that interpretation is really what life is about. So the division between non-fiction and fiction has a certain logic, but it's a very limited one. And by and large, it isn't helpful.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Series
Large
Fiction
Facts
Division
Certain
Interpretation
Really
Helpful
Life
Limited
Logic

More quotes by 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.
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Don’t you bully me with your politeness!
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I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.
Yann Martel
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My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.
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We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.
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Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.
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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.
Yann Martel
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I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo. I would like to add a third, to wit, the rapid and direct approch of a known killer
Yann Martel
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You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
Yann Martel
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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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For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.
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?
Yann Martel
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That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
Yann Martel
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Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.
Yann Martel
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I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.
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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Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.
Yann Martel
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To me, the research is a way of exploring what it means to be alive.
Yann Martel
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What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.
Yann Martel
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I turned around, stepped over the Zebra and threw myself overboard.
Yann Martel