A Quote by Michael Ondaatje
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
Related Quotes
My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.
I remember reading about a court case where a man tried to stab a judge with a pencil. There are Google pages full of similar instances around the world. It's obvious that the pencil lends itself to precisely that kind of use. It's not as lacking in dominance as you might think. I have an article on the fallacy of the designer intent because a lot of designers think they can design uses into technology. You can't do that. I use the pen, I make the mark, but the pen is also using me. The pen could be said to be allowing these kinds of marks. I can't do just anything with the pen.
I write in pen because it works. A fountain pen is no good for writing in the way I do because I'd have to decide, each time I stopped, how long I was likely to stop for in order to know whether or not to put the cap on. But I never know. So instead, I use a ballpoint - a Montblanc, to be precise - the most comfortably balanced pen I've ever found.
Don't listen to me. Listen to yourself ... People often ask me at this age, 'Who am I passing the torch to?' First of all, I'm not giving up my torch, thank you! I'm using my torch to light other people's torches. ... If we each have a torch, there's a lot more light.
Enter with the torch in the stadium. 80,000 people screaming. I was waiting downstairs for the start for 10 hours; I was so tired with the torch. I give the torch to the combined ski cross country that they win gold in Lillehammer in 1994.
I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.
A good boxer, in striking the round blow, instead of loosening body and arm, gathers himself into a heap of muscularity and begins his blow where all blows ought to begin, from the solidarity of the right foot.
Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.
Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened.
When you're given a certain amount of power - like, you're a writer and an employed writer, and you put pen to paper, and people are going to read what you write - that's power.
To get a roaster clean, send something like baked apples in it to a neighbor. Neighbors always return pans spotless, and you won't have to use a blow torch on it like you usually do.
If you want to be a fiction writer, you need to start reading like a fiction writer. To do so, you need to learn about craft so that the next time you pick up a contemporary short story, you're reading it not as an abstraction floating in formaldehyde, existing simply for the theorist's dull scalpel to saw on, but as a concrete thing constructed out of words and shaped by syntax, brought to life by a writer who made several thousand choices, some large, some small, before letting that imperfect beauty, the story, walk on its own two feet.
The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.
It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.
Faith is like lighting the torch that passes from one person to the next. You can't light the torch of another if yours isn't burning.
I also taught myself how to blow glass using a propane torch from the hardware store and managed to make some elementary chemistry plumbing such as tees and small glass bulbs.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist