Yann Martel Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by Yann Martel:
'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write.
~Yann Martel
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May books spread the world over!
~Yann Martel
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Most of us get our history through story.
~Yann Martel
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Cinema is incredibly concise.
~Yann Martel
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The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.
~Yann Martel
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In all big cities the style of life is the same. Same endless array of restaurants; same big museums with the usual suspects; same anonymity, which can be thrilling when you're young but which I found got tiresome.
~Yann Martel
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How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.
~Yann Martel
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I am not an autobiographical writer.
~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.
~Yann Martel
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I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.
~Yann Martel
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Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
~Yann Martel
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If a film project were available and the timing was right, I might be interested.
~Yann Martel
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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
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I love Canada. It's a wonderful political act of faith that exists atop a breathtakingly beautiful land.
~Yann Martel
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I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.
~Yann Martel
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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
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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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You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
~Yann Martel
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It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.
~Yann Martel
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Words aren't very good at describing complicated, strange visual things. You can try, and the reader will have some sort of image in their mind, but words aren't good at that.
~Yann Martel
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Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.
~Yann Martel
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If I didn't have children, I think my life would be a failure.
~Yann Martel
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I write slowly.
~Yann Martel
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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
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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
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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.
~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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Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.
~Yann Martel
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Words are much better at relating emotions and thoughts.
~Yann Martel
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A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.
~Yann Martel
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I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.
~Yann Martel
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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
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I'm still learning my craft.
~Yann Martel
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Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling.
~Yann Martel
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I'm happy pretty well anywhere on this big, beautiful planet.
~Yann Martel
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The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.
~Yann Martel
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I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.
~Yann Martel
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I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.
~Yann Martel
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