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
tears
We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.
dream sleep years
She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
writing thinking hands
I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.
borders crosses our-lives
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 that we cross.
wall crazy scratches
Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy
heart mean sleep
A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.
hair long sorrow
The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion
love heart loss
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
trust order firsts
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
falling-in-love fall doe
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
falling-in-love mean thinking
Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now.
violence faces danger
There's more danger in the violence you don't face.
interesting secret important
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
blow use torches
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch,