quotes from classic
/ page 540 of 1205 /You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
I grew up in a country that was very different - the germs of racism were there then, I just wasn't aware of it.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
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.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
Anil's Ghost is a pretty serious book, but you do want to have a break.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch..
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
Prose is much more public; I would like it to be as private, intimate, casual, not structured as poetry, not having an agenda.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
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.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
I do know that film is much more visceral, in terms of its effect on the reader.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
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.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
Anil's Ghost may be a familiar style to earlier books I've written, but it feels new to me.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
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.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
more quotes from Michael Ondaatje
