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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?

Yann Martel

It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
YANN MARTEL

Book Life Names Sometimes
I have a story that will make you believe in God.
YANN MARTEL

Believe God Stories
My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.
YANN MARTEL

Ambition Art Skulls
People always seek to compare. They can take the new, but only if it is somehow connected to the familiar.
YANN MARTEL

Connected Men People Sea
Much hostile and aggressive behaviour among animals is the expression of social insecurity.
YANN MARTEL

Animal Expression Insecurity
I went about the job in a direct way. I took the hatchet in both my hands and vigorously beat the fish on the head with the hammerhead (I still didn’t have the stomach to use the sharp edge).
YANN MARTEL

Blue Hands Jobs Stomach Vigorously
The 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.
YANN MARTEL

Dark Moon Stars
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.
YANN MARTEL

Emotional Fiction Real
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 MARTEL

Country Imagination Love Possible
I’m not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don’t have a mobile. I just don’t need things. I don’t like things.
YANN MARTEL

Clothes Hate Needs
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.
YANN MARTEL

Blue Castaway Moon Night
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.
YANN MARTEL

Irrational Names Numbers Understanding
Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.
YANN MARTEL

Fiction Mean Play Reality
Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.
YANN MARTEL

Company Madness Misery
Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love – but sometimes it was so hard to love.
YANN MARTEL

Faith Go God Letting Opening Up
How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter?
YANN MARTEL

Broken Spirit Long Water

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?

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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?

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Yann Martel Quotes