We think we live in a global village. We don’t. The world is a big and beautiful and incredibly varied place. It can only be known locally, with your two feet on the ground. We should stick to our own gardens, as Voltaire said.
YANN MARTELJust as art brings you to another place, so does religion – and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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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.
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I felt I was beating a rainbow to death
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I am reminded of a story of Lord Krishna when he was a cowherd. Every night he invites the milkmaids to dance with him in the forest. They come and they dance. The night is dark, the fire in their midst roars and crackles, the beat of the music gets ever faster.
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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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If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
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Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
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Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.
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If you don’t have dreams, how do you maneuver reality? Where do you get the ideas to change reality if not from dreams?
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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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People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar.
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The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.
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Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them — and then they leap.
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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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I know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
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You can get used to anything – haven’t I already said that? Isn’t that what all survivors say?
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