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
real cities way
Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
father heart way
Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.
wall nurse way
He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.
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.
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.
together juxtaposition strange
I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.