A Quote by Michael Ondaatje
As someone who writes novels that are often set in other periods of time or other ages or other landscapes, there's a certain element of research I have to do, and often, the more laconic people are, the more interesting they become.
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In America, quite often, for people from a certain economic position two choices become very evident as to their adult life. One is crime, one is the military. And it is quite often that some people choose one or the other, their options not being as many as someone from a higher income.
Better than other people.' Sometimes he says: 'That, at least, you are.' But more often: 'Why should you be? Either you are what you can be, or you are not - like other people.
I'm particularly bad at breaking if something's funny. I'm not professional, so I do often laugh, but less at what I do and more often at what other people do.
It's not the number of trucks parked outside that make a movie interesting but if you have more money, you have more time. More time enables you to try out other possibilities or follow an interesting lead. I don't like indulgence, but to have more possibilities is always more interesting.
A lot of the characters I end up playing have a certain degree of glamour or sexiness, but I like it when you can have some other element that makes it much more interesting.
A deadness occurs in relationships when people are no longer willing to tell each other how they really feel. When people first fall in love they're more willing to do this because they're still getting to know each other and dependency has not yet set in. As soon as it does, though, people often stop sharing their true feelings out of fear of loss.
Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.
It's much more interesting for me to think that taking a chunk of experience and mushing it up together with other things that are inventible, remembered from some other time or stolen from other people's stories... and see if I can make it into something that works, an object, a little machine that runs.
Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession, their madness is less often remarked.
In places such as Kazakhstan and Mongolia people depend on each other a lot more. We can often be quite detached in the West, with e-mail and telephones, whereas in those countries people rely on each other more. It's lovely because you feel like, although you're a stranger, they respect you as a friend and want to help you.
One thing scientists have discovered is that often-praised children become more intelligent than often-blamed ones. There's a creative element in praise.
The sole purpose of marketing is to sell more to more people, more often and at higher prices. There is no other reason to do it.
Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.
Constant conflict is actually often good politics. Because the more you can inflame your supporters the more likely they are to show up at election day. And if they're more inflamed than the other side, even if the other side has more people agreeing with it, you'll win, because your crowd will show up.
In Rome people seem to love with more zest, murder with more imagination, submit to creative urges more often, and lose the sense of logic more easily than in any other place.
I often wondered why I was attracted to certain landscapes and not others and why my photographs (and depictions by other artists) looked the way they did, Archetypes imprinted on my mind started me on a search.
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