Yann Martel
A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.Collection: Art
Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life.Collection: Life Of Pi Book
What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.Collection: Farewell
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.Collection: Animal
My greatest wish — other than salvation — was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One I could read again and again, with new eyes and a fresh understanding each time.Collection: Book
Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious.Collection: Mockery
Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.Collection: Essence
Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!Collection: Jesus
Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love.Collection: Letting Go
I love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.Collection: Country
If you stumble over mere believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe? Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwaterCollection: Believe
If you went to a home, kicked down the front door, chased the people who lived there out into the street and said, Go! You are free! Free as a bird! Go! Go! - do you think they would shout and dance for joy? They wouldn't. Birds are not free. The people you've just evicted would sputter, With what right do you throw us out? This is our home. We own it. We have lived here for years. We're calling the police, you scoundrel.Collection: Home
But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.Collection: Christian
Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.Collection: Love
As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have.Collection: Loneliness
That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?Collection: Reality
When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.Collection: Sad
Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?Collection: Giving
To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity.Collection: Dignity
I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it.Collection: Writing
It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.Collection: Fear
We believe what we see.’...What do you do when you’re in the dark?Collection: Believe
The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?Collection: Life
The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.Collection: Swings
The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.Collection: Struggle
Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart.Collection: Goodbye
If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?Collection: Sky
Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.Collection: Joy
So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?' Mr. Okamoto: 'That's an interesting question?' Mr. Chiba: 'The story with animals.' Mr. Okamoto: 'Yes. The story with animals is the better story.' Pi Patel: 'Thank you. And so it goes with God.Collection: Animal
It's hard to visualize James Bond without seeing one of the actors who played him. And it's hard to visualize Harry Potter without seeing Daniel Radcliffe. A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.Collection: Powerful
Even when God seemed to have abandoned me, he was watching. Even when he seemed indifferent to my suffering, he was watching. And when I was beyond all hope of saving, he gave me rest. Then he gave me a sign to continue my journey.Collection: Journey
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.Collection: Grateful
The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.Collection: Stars
Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness.Collection: Bird
There's nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.Collection: Believe
Time is an illusion that makes us all pant.Collection: Illusion
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.Collection: Decision
I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.Collection: Zoos
I chose the name Pi because it's an irrational number (one with no discernable pattern). Yet scientists use this irrational number to come to a "rational" understanding of the universe. To me, religion is a bit like that, "irrational" yet with it we come together we come to a sound understanding of the universe.Collection: Irrational Numbers
A house is a compressed territory where our basic needs can be fulfilled close by and safely.Collection: House
Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.Collection: Heart
Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with a few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher. Physically it is extraordinarily arduous, and morally it is killing...You get your happiness where you can. You reach a point where you're at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you're the luckiest person on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fishCollection: Life
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.Collection: Motivational
There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God... These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside.Collection: People
Religion is more than rite and ritual.Collection: Life Of Pi Book
...if you fall into a lion's pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it's hungry-be assured, zoo animals are amply fed-or because it's bloodthirsty, but because you've invaded it's territory.Collection: Zoos
Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion - and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.Collection: Art
I've never forgotten him. Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart. I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. The pain is like an axe that chops my heart.Collection: Goodbye
I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.Collection: Beautiful