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
Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.
Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.
A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.
In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.
My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.
Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.
I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.
How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.
Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion - and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.
It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.
You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
If I didn't have children, I think my life would be a failure.
I'm happy pretty well anywhere on this big, beautiful planet.
A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.