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Yann Martel - From the Ambition category:
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)
Yann Martel - From the Appreciation category:
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. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Art category:
A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Art category:
Beatrice and Virgil...
Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Artists category:
I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Beauty category:
Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Belief category:
- Life of Pi, 2001...
If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe? (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Books category:
- Life of Pi...
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. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Change category:
It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Choices category:
To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Communication category:
A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Desire category:
- Life of Pi...
The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Desperation category:
- Life of Pi, 2001...
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)
Yann Martel - From the Doubt category:
Beatrice and Virgil...
To my mind, faith is like being in the sun. When you are in the sun, can you avoid creating a shadow? ...You can't. This shadow is doubt. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Earth category:
- Life of Pi...
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)
Yann Martel - From the Eccentricity category:
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Emotion category:
My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Expectation category:
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)
Yann Martel - From the Fame category:
Beatrice and Virgil...
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. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Fear category:
I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Goodness category:
- Life of Pi, 2001...
For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Happiness category:
Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Harmony category:
-Life of Pi...
I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Humanity category:
Stories - individual stories, family stories, national stories - are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Importance category:
-Life of Pi...
It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Interpretation category:
Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Keys category:
Beatrice and Virgil...
The precept that location is key to the success of a business applies to art, and even to life itself: we thrive or wither depending on how nourishing our environment is. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Language category:
The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Life category:
Beatrice and Virgil...
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Love category:
-Life of Pi...
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. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Memory category:
I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Music category:
-Life of Pi...
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)
Yann Martel - From the Nature category:
Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Opposites category:
-Life of Pi...
The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Patriotism category:
I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Peace category:
-Life of Pi...
There's no peace like the peace of an inner courtyard on a sunny day. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Perfection category:
-Life of Pi...
I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Pets category:
Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Pleasure category:
My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it? (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Possessions category:
I'm not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don't have a mobile. I just don't need things. I don't like things. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Questions category:
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? (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Reality category:
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)
Yann Martel - From the Religion category:
-Life of Pi...
Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat-wearing Muslims. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Religion category:
-Life of Pi...
Christianity is a religion in a rush. Look at the world created in seven days. Even on a symbolic level, that's creation in a frenzy. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Repetition category:
-Life of Pi, page 25...
Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Rules category:
If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Sadness category:
Gloom is but a shadow of a cloud passing by... (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Shock category:
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)
Yann Martel - From the Survival category:
Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Technology category:
Progress is unstoppable... Technology helps and good ideas spread - these are two laws of nature. If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood! (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Thought category:
-Life of Pi...
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)
Yann Martel - From the Time category:
-Life of Pi, 2001...
Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Travel category:
If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it? (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Truth category:
Beatrice and Virgil...
Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Truth category:
Beatrice and Virgil...
As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Understanding category:
-Life of Pi...
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? (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Universe category:
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. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Windows category:
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)
Yann Martel - From the Wonder category:
First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Words category:
-Beatrice & Virgil, 2010...
Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field - but they're all we have. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Worry category:
Beatrice and Virgil...
Don't worry about being good... Aspire to be authentic. (Yann Martel)
Yann Martel - From the Writing category:
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)
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