Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje
Philip Michael Ondaatje, OC, is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet. He won the Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient, which was adapted as the 1996 film of the same name...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 September 1943
CountryCanada
falling-in-love dark mirrors
She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.
sadness knowing remember
That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
taken mean secret
I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin - as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place.
morning heart cutting
Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again
romantic book reflection
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.
trouble
The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.
dog forget-everything borders
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.
writing stories plot
When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.
music night darkness
What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.
dream bones
What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.
our-world world opinion
Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.
doors novel
I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
morning pages half
Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.
views perfect states
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.