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
blow use torches
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch,
life soul loses
From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.
kings white shapes
Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
writing views perception
It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.
echoes glasses childhood
For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.
trouble
The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn't be.
sadness knowing remember
That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.
taken mean secret
I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin - as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place.
country brother fate
Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.
love-is use
Love is the use one makes of another.
break-up breakup betrayal
You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.
has-beens ifs
He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
art voice sometimes
...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
life world maps
All I ever wanted was a world without maps.