Ruth Ozeki
Ruth Ozeki
Ruth Ozekiis an American-Canadian novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She worked in commercial television and media production for over a decade and made several independent films before turning to writing fiction...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 March 1956
CountryCanada
casting future interested readers relate talk time voice writers
I am really interested in the way we relate to time. In particular, the way readers and writers talk to each other. Casting your voice out into the future is very beautiful to me.
alone telling time
Writing is solitary. You spend so much time alone and in your own mind, telling stories.
realise starting time
I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly.
behind conform control filming narrative reality spent time wishing
I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.
enormous exactly japan looked realized saw shock society suddenly time
The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.
entire hard pinpoint time trace writes
Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and it's hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.
certainly fictional multiple stories
What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.
good inquiry prejudices rather spirit
When I start writing these novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.
fiction heard legal people seen
People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.
certainly cross easily fact filmmakers played readily
I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.
canada great growing
Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.
author heart onto political push struggle trying views
It makes me nuts, the idea that if you put a political struggle at the heart of your book, then it has to be that the author - me - is trying in some way to push my views onto my readers.
trying
When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.
There's something about Vonnegut's deadpan irony that I really like. And I like Borges' puzzle structure.