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Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love – but sometimes it was so hard to love.

Yann Martel

Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.
YANN MARTEL

Animal Expression Insecurity
If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
YANN MARTEL

Fiction Genre Writing
Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life.
YANN MARTEL

Life Lifeboat
When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
YANN MARTEL

Pain Sad Unbearable
We don’t want any invention. We want the ‘straight facts,’ as you say in English.” Isn’t telling about something–using words, English or Japanese–already something of an invention? Isn’t just looking upon this world already something of an invention?
YANN MARTEL

Country Invention Language People Some Something
I’m not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don’t have a mobile. I just don’t need things. I don’t like things.
YANN MARTEL

Clothes Hate Needs
In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.
YANN MARTEL

Air Art Stories
I 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 MARTEL

Add Hearing Two Unexpected
The animals might embody certain traits. We think of tigers as being ferocious, etc. But to my mind, it was the other way around: the humans embodied certain animal traits.
YANN MARTEL

Animal Mind Thinking
I had to stop hoping so much that a ship would rescue me. I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me.
YANN MARTEL

Dream Hands Mistake
I can’t live for more than four years outside of Canada. I’m Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.
YANN MARTEL

Country Four People Years
Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
YANN MARTEL

Civilization Territory Zoos
If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?
YANN MARTEL

Believe Life Love
Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it’s true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.
YANN MARTEL

Emotional Fiction Real
That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
YANN MARTEL

Essence Fiction Reality
Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?
YANN MARTEL

Greater Happiness Salvation

Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love – but sometimes it was so hard to love.

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Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love – but sometimes it was so hard to love.

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Popular Authors

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