Yann Martel
Yann Martel
Yann Martelis a Spanish-born Canadian author best known for the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi, a #1 international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the Bestseller Lists of the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, among many other bestseller lists. It was adapted to the screen and directed by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscarsincluding Best Director and won the...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 June 1963
CitySalamanca, Spain
CountryCanada
My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.
It is a vast country, so that inspires you. It's also the greatest hotel on earth: It welcomes people from everywhere. It's a good country to write from because in many ways Canada is the world.
Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.
The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?
India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it.
It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.
To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures who people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing--I'm sorry, I would rather not go on.
You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.
When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite.
I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.