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Sitting in an office for TOO long is not natural, perhaps, so that's why we should change it. I didn't say that out-and-out capitalism, which reduces humanity to dollar figures, is natural.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Change
Dollars
Long
Figures
Sitting
Office
Perhaps
Humanity
Reduces
Natural
Dollar
Didn
Capitalism

More quotes by Yann Martel

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Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.
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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.
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Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.
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Most people take who they are, naturally, as a given, and they're interested in the sexual other, but not in being the sexual other. Most men are interested in women - whether sexually or not is not the question - but they don't necessarily want to be a woman.
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I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.
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.
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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For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.
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
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What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences.
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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It was as unbelievable as the moon catching fire.
Yann Martel
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High calls low and low calls high. I tell you, if you were in such dire straits as I was, you too would elevate your thoughts. The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
Yann Martel
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You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!
Yann Martel
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It's amazing how willpower can build walls.
Yann Martel
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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
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We think we live in a global village. We don't. The world is a big and beautiful and incredibly varied place. It can only be known locally, with your two feet on the ground. We should stick to our own gardens, as Voltaire said.
Yann Martel
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Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.
Yann Martel
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I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.
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.
Yann Martel