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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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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
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More quotes by Yann Martel
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
Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.
Yann Martel
First wonder goes deepest wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.
Yann Martel
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
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
Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness.
Yann Martel
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
Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?
Yann Martel
Bapu Gandhi said, ‘All religions are true.’ I just want to love God.
Yann Martel
Work, work, work, but what mark do we leave, what point do we make? People who are too beholden to work become like erasers: as things move forward, they leave in their wake no trace of themselves.
Yann Martel
My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
Yann Martel
I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving. I was weeping because ....fill in the blank with whatever/whoever helped you survive... had left me so unceremoniously.
Yann Martel
You can get used to anything - haven't I already said that? Isn't that what all survivors say?
Yann Martel
A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.
Yann Martel
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
I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.
Yann Martel
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
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
What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.
Yann Martel
Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food is low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured.
Yann Martel