Top 176 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Ondaatje

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.

I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

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.

A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.

In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.

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.

I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

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.

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.

The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.

You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.

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.

It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.

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.

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.

To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.

...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.

Death means you are in the third person.

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.

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. 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 we cross.

Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.

The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.

All I ever wanted was a world without maps.

There's more danger in the violence you don't face.

Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy

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.

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.

Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

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.

Love is the use one makes of another.

How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.

A novel is a mirror walking down a road

Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again

Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.

Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.

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.

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.

Sadness is very close to hate.

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.

That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

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.

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 lion