It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
YANN MARTELIt is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
YANN MARTELI can well imagine an athiest’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!” – and the deathbed leap of faith.
YANN MARTELJust 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 MARTELI went about the job in a direct way. I took the hatchet in both my hands and vigorously beat the fish on the head with the hammerhead (I still didn’t have the stomach to use the sharp edge).
YANN MARTELSurvival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one’s life away.
YANN MARTELI have a fierce will to live. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others – and I am one of those – never give up. We fight and fight and fight.
YANN MARTELThe three religions because I wanted to discuss faith, not organized religion, so wanted to relativize organized religion by having Pi practice three.
YANN MARTELThe idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.
YANN MARTELArt 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.
YANN MARTELAt moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.
YANN MARTELFor evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.
YANN MARTELThe moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.
YANN MARTELTo 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.
YANN MARTELCan there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?
YANN MARTELWe were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.
YANN MARTELI felt I was beating a rainbow to death
YANN MARTEL