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
character arguing
It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
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.
character eye simple
when someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colors, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He's never sure what an eye reveals. but he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.
character tests way
There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.
book character writing
One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
falling-in-love fall doe
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
point state
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.
writing space people
There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
couple parent scary
I kind of was shoveled onto a boat at 11 and went to England. I didn't have any parent watching over me. It was very free and may have been a bit of a scary time for me, but I really don't remember much about the voyage apart from playing ping-pong a lot with a couple friends.
doors space people
I often need a limited space. It's like having a house to roam around in and reinvent and have things to happen in, kind of like a French farce. Doors opening, doors closing, new people arriving, and disappearing, and so forth.
kids writing giving
People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.
growing-up war australia
I want the marginality to come into the center. This is the thing I was conscious of growing up, when I later lived in England. I saw all these war movies that came out shortly after the war, and they were all about the war being fought by Englishmen or Americans, there were no other "allies" in it - from India or Australia, etc.
next reason scene
There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.
patterns lists looks
If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.