Quotes by Michael Ondaatje
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The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
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.
It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
When I was writing Billy the Kid, all I had was the question, How do I write this book? That's always the question.
I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.
Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
I read fiction, a little nonfiction, a little poetry - as various as possible.
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.
I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
Anil's Ghost may be a familiar style to earlier books I've written, but it feels new to me.
I did not expect Anil's Ghost to go off into a twenty or thirty page section in the Grove of Ascetics when I began, but that seemed to be the way the book should go.
I do know that film is much more visceral, in terms of its effect on the reader.
As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
One of the metaphors was the burial and stealing of Buddhist statues, how they get stolen and buried, unearthed and resold. Like human life, a metaphor for human life.
Prose is much more public; I would like it to be as private, intimate, casual, not structured as poetry, not having an agenda.
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch..
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.
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