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
voice echoes soul
For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.
girl believe fall
Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.
beautiful wall clothes
You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her...
joy aces prison
There was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away, put me in prison, but I will know [her] when we are old.
growing-up war fate
That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.
rain dry olives
He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.
stars wall doors
Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.
writing bored stories
I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
father heart way
Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.
country home odd
It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.
responsibility stories reader
It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
busy archaeology
As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
altered being-loved
I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.
blue hands names
In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.