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
writing would-be
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
writing world kind
When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.
drama want action
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
dangerous wrong-time
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
past stills
The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
writing ideas no-idea
Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
light historical research
Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
sad hate sadness
Sadness is very close to hate.
dream bones
What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.
writing want opinion
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
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...
literature emotion
There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
rain
all this Beethoven and rain
night hands new-orleans
You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)