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
whole-life whole
How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
music song journey
If any of you on your journeys see her-shout to me, whistle...he sang, and it became a habit for audiences to shout and whistle in response to those lines. There was nowhere he could hide in such a song that had all of its doors and windows open, so that he could walk out of it artlessly, the antiphonal responses blending with him as if he were no longer on stage.
queens character desire
She moved from being a young woman into having the angular look of a queen, someone who has made her face with her desire to be a certain kind of person. He still likes that about her. Her smartness, the fact that she did not inherit that look or that beauty, but it was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character.
long too-much teach
I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read into hardly anything at all.
sad hate sadness
Sadness is very close to hate.
night hands new-orleans
You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
writing want opinion
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
writing would-be
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
drama want action
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
dangerous wrong-time
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
writing ideas no-idea
Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
world males habit
We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.
literature emotion
There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
writing god-knows has-beens
I see myself as someone who's been saved by writing. God knows what I would have been, become or how I would have ended up without it.