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
notebook cat writing
If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.
men world emotion
He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.
dog new-orleans naked
Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half-naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
book doors cells
This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
queens character desire
She moved from being a young woman into having the angular look of a queen, someone who has made her face with her desire to be a certain kind of person. He still likes that about her. Her smartness, the fact that she did not inherit that look or that beauty, but it was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character.
sleep boys prison
Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.
views perfect states
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.
interesting secret important
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
rain dry olives
He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.
book wind palaces
... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.
hate sadness men
You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.
morning pages half
Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.
music song journey
If any of you on your journeys see her-shout to me, whistle...he sang, and it became a habit for audiences to shout and whistle in response to those lines. There was nowhere he could hide in such a song that had all of its doors and windows open, so that he could walk out of it artlessly, the antiphonal responses blending with him as if he were no longer on stage.
lying sri-lanka facts
In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.