Top 268 Quotes & Sayings by Yann Martel

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Canadian author Yann Martel.

Last updated on September 16, 2024.

Yann Martel, is a Canadian author best known for the Man Booker Prize–winning novel Life of Pi, an international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, among many other best-selling lists. It was adapted for a film directed by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars including Best Director and winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.

Canadian - Author | Born: June 25, 1963

Source: Wikipedia

The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.

Yann Martel

I love Canada. It's a wonderful political act of faith that exists atop a breathtakingly beautiful land.

Yann Martel

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

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

If I didn't have children, I think my life would be a failure.

Yann Martel

I'm happy pretty well anywhere on this big, beautiful planet.

Yann Martel

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

I write slowly.

Yann Martel

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

Most of us get our history through story.

Yann Martel

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

If a film project were available and the timing was right, I might be interested.

Yann Martel

Cinema is incredibly concise.

Yann Martel

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

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.

Yann Martel

Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

Yann Martel

You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.

Yann Martel

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

I am not an autobiographical writer.

Yann Martel

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

May books spread the world over!

Yann Martel

The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.

Yann Martel

I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.

Yann Martel

'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write.

Yann Martel

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

I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.

Yann Martel

Words are much better at relating emotions and thoughts.

Yann Martel

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

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

Yann Martel

If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.

Yann Martel

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

Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling.

Yann Martel

A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.

Yann Martel

I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.

Yann Martel

Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.

Yann Martel

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

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

I'm still learning my craft.

Yann Martel

I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.

Yann Martel

If you stumble about 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?

Yann Martel

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

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Yann Martel

Religion is more than rite and ritual.

Yann Martel

The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.

Yann Martel

Truth is a nebulous thing. There are certain, definite truths, but the truth of our lives goes far beyond facts.

Yann Martel

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.

Yann Martel

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

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

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy.

Yann Martel

Don’t worry about being good…. Aspire to be authentic.

Yann Martel

The presence of God is the finest of rewards.

Yann Martel

...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.

Yann Martel

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.

Yann Martel

I can only tell my story, what you believe is up to you.

Yann Martel

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

It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.

Yann Martel

I was giving up. I would have given up - if a voice hadn't made itself heard in my heart. The voice said "I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen everyday. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen.

Yann Martel

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.

Yann Martel

If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Yann Martel

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.

Yann Martel

Top 268 Quotes & Sayings by Yann Martel

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