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.
YANN MARTELIn that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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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.
YANN MARTEL -
Even when God seemed to have abandoned me, he was watching. Even when he seemed indifferent to my suffering, he was watching. And when I was beyond all hope of saving, he gave me rest. Then he gave me a sign to continue my journey.
YANN MARTEL -
If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn’t love hard to believe?
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I was giving up. I would have given up – if a voice hadn’t made itself heard in my heart. The voice said “I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare.
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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.
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Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.
YANN MARTEL -
People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar.
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I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It’s a terrible burden to carry. All sentient life is sacred.
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I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
YANN MARTEL -
You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.
YANN MARTEL -
It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I’ve made none the champion.
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Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.
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Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat wearing Muslims.
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We always see the Holocaust in terms of black-and-white images, barking Germans, cowering Jews.
YANN MARTEL -
I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.
YANN MARTEL