Stories–individual stories, family stories, national stories–are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.
YANN MARTELZoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
More Yann Martel Quotes
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Art 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.
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At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.
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Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love.
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Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.
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It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
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…for everything has a trace of the divine in it.
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I have a story that will make you believe in God.
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A realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.
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I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people’s minds.
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Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans.
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I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving.
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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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I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.
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He’s a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.
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science can only take you so far and then you have to leap
YANN MARTEL