Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious.
YANN MARTELAfterwards, when it’s all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?
More Yann Martel Quotes
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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 MARTEL -
My greatest wish – other than salvation – was to have a book.
YANN MARTEL -
We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.
YANN MARTEL -
He’s a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.
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…for everything has a trace of the divine in it.
YANN MARTEL -
A zoo is not an ideal place for an animal – of course the best place for a chimp is the wilds of Tanzania – but a good zoo is a decent, acceptable place.
YANN MARTEL -
I would have like PI to be a Jew, too, to practice Judaism, but there are two religions that are explicitly incompatible: Christianity and Judaism. Where one begins, the other ends, according to Christians, and where one endures, the other strays, according to Jews.
YANN MARTEL -
Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
YANN MARTEL -
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.
YANN MARTEL -
Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.
YANN MARTEL -
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 MARTEL -
The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.
YANN MARTEL -
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.
YANN MARTEL -
Don’t you bully me with your politeness!
YANN MARTEL -
I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.
YANN MARTEL -
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.
YANN MARTEL -
My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
YANN MARTEL -
I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.
YANN MARTEL -
I would like to add a third, to wit, the rapid and direct approch of a known killer
YANN MARTEL -
Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
YANN MARTEL -
I have a fierce will to live. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others – and I am one of those – never give up. We fight and fight and fight.
YANN MARTEL -
You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
YANN MARTEL -
I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo.
YANN MARTEL -
As much as I love movies, it would be presumptuous of me to think that I know how to make one.
YANN MARTEL -
Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.
YANN MARTEL -
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.
YANN MARTEL