Michael Ondaatje
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.Collection: Trust
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.
I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.
That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.
I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.
When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.
You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.
Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.
The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.Collection: Borders
She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.Collection: Shapes
There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.Collection: Character
I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.Collection: Falling In Love
We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.Collection: Tears
Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.Collection: Our World
Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazyCollection: Wall
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.Collection: Relationship
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.Collection: Trust
That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.Collection: Sadness
The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.Collection: Trouble
For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.Collection: Echoes
All I ever wanted was a world without maps.Collection: Life
In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.Collection: Water
For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.Collection: Dream
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.Collection: Men
I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.Collection: Writing
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.Collection: Love
Love is the use one makes of another.Collection: Love Is
...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.Collection: Art
Death means you are in the third person.Collection: Mean
The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lionCollection: Hair
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.Collection: Falling In Love
So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.Collection: Book