India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it.
YANN MARTELCome aboard if your destination is oblivion- it should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat if you want. But it’s a sad view.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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Music is a bird’s answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness.
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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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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.
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The 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?
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To 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.
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In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.
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I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people’s minds.
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Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love.
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We always see the Holocaust in terms of black-and-white images, barking Germans, cowering Jews.
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Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.
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I was not wounded in any part of my body, but I had never experienced such intense pain, such a ripping of the nerves, such an ache of the heart.
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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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Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
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The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it’s like to be a woman doesn’t strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea.
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I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.
YANN MARTEL






