Yann Martel Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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While it may be true that the UAE has been an ally since the September 11, 2001, attacks, the American people know it has also harbored and aided some of the al Qaeda agents who were involved in that attack.
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I have this kind of mild nice-guy exterior, but inside my heart is like a steel trap.
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I hate a man who always says 'yes' to me. When I say 'no' I like a man who also says 'no.'
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I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional... I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.
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I grew up outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a little town, and went to a regular high school. I was a... very average student in that high school. Then I joined the Navy, and while I was in the Navy, I was in a motorcycle accident and woke up deaf in a hospital.
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I've done some really off-the-wall stuff and stuff that people might not expect. That's one way to work through people's expectations of you.
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Common wisdom dictates that the vice president should provide balance to the ticket by representing a different part of the country, another set of experiences, or a basketful of electoral votes.
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Some people seem to sort of have a gut for hiring. I literally had a gut that was exactly the opposite. So whenever I thought someone would be great, it was sort of the opposite.
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I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.
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Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
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We may define therapy as a search for value.
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I think the success of democracy is not really police security; it's the presence of a broad middle class. The stronger the middle class of a people is, the less you have to worry about one group coming in and exploiting the democratic process for its own ends.
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In studio films, everything has to be boxed in, everybody needs to know beforehand - this is comedy, this is sci-fi, this is drama - and what's the point of independent film if you don't get to experiment?
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A lot of artists don't like the sound of their voice. They're put off by it.
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One of the disadvantages of being a patrician is that occasionally you're obliged to act like one.
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I enjoy music wherever it's coming from.
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Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don't, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work. It's not consistent. I am not consistent. But I feel OK with that.
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The VA does a lot of good things, but determining if a firm is a small business is not one of them.
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In a novel, I think you have a contract with the reader to make the character representative - of a moment in history, a social class... for instance, I wanted to make the boy in 'A Boy's Own Story' more like other gay men of my generation in their youth and not like me.
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Tupac, Biggie, Jay. Your usual suspects. These were the people that was played in my household.
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A spiritual person is also in touch with his or her own reality, feelings and thoughts, and the reality of the people around him or her, not projecting on them.
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I'm just so proud to be from San Francisco and to have a family history there. It's only two generations back, but still, it's two generations in San Francisco. I love it. I'm so proud of it.
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Work is the means of living, but it is not living.
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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.
