Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.
YANN MARTELLife on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.
YANN MARTELHow true is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.
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 MARTELWe think we live in a global village. We don’t. The world is a big and beautiful and incredibly varied place. It can only be known locally, with your two feet on the ground. We should stick to our own gardens, as Voltaire said.
YANN MARTELA movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.
YANN MARTELThe 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?
YANN MARTELI can’t live for more than four years outside of Canada. I’m Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.
YANN MARTELStories–individual stories, family stories, national stories–are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.
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 find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people’s minds.
YANN MARTELI am reminded of a story of Lord Krishna when he was a cowherd. Every night he invites the milkmaids to dance with him in the forest. They come and they dance. The night is dark, the fire in their midst roars and crackles, the beat of the music gets ever faster.
YANN MARTEL…for everything has a trace of the divine in it.
YANN MARTELMisery loves company, and madness calls it forth.
YANN MARTELI have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo.
YANN MARTELThe reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.
YANN MARTELLife is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness–how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I’ve got!
YANN MARTEL