I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it’s sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It’s a very laborious process, but I love doing it.
YANN MARTELIt’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
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We always see the Holocaust in terms of black-and-white images, barking Germans, cowering Jews.
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For fear, real fear such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it.
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The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
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Religion is just an alternate way of reading reality – you read material reality, and then you add on an extra layer of religiosity that deepens that understanding of reality. Some countries have lost that capacity, or dismissed it or marginalized it.
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We are all born like Catholics, aren’t we—in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?
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I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
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We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.
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And in between the two, in between the sky and the sea, were all the winds. And there were all the nights and all the moons. To be a castaway is to be a point perpetually at the centre of a circle.
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People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar.
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I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.
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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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My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described.
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I chose the name Pi because it’s an irrational number (one with no discernable pattern). Yet scientists use this irrational number to come to a “rational” understanding of the universe. To me, religion is a bit like that, “irrational” yet with it we come together we come to a sound understanding of the universe.
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It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.
YANN MARTEL