Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they’re all we have.
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.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!
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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.
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I felt I was beating a rainbow to death
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It was as unbelievable as the moon catching fire.
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Life 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!
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Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.
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When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
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It’s amazing how willpower can build walls.
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A zoo is not an ideal place for an animal – of course the best place for a chimp is the wilds of Tanzania – but a good zoo is a decent, acceptable place.
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A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.
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Sitting in an office for TOO long is not natural, perhaps, so that’s why we should change it. I didn’t say that out-and-out capitalism, which reduces humanity to dollar figures, is natural.
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The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.
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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.
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There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God… These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside.
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Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.
YANN MARTEL