He’s a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.
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.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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Life is an interpretation of a series of facts, and that interpretation is really what life is about. So the division between non-fiction and fiction has a certain logic, but it’s a very limited one. And by and large, it isn’t helpful.
YANN MARTEL -
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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I can’t live for more than four years outside of Canada. I’m Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.
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How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter?
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You may not believe in life, but I don’t believe in death. Move on!
YANN MARTEL -
If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
YANN MARTEL -
I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.
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Once you’ve been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal.
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Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.
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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?
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The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving.
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I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he’s not careful.
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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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First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.
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Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?
YANN MARTEL