Yann Martel Quotes
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I cannot think of a better way to spread the faith. No thundering from a pulpit, no condemnation from bad churches, no peer pressure, just a book of scripture quietly waiting to say hello, as gentle and powerful as a little girl's kiss on your cheek.
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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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A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.
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Japanese-owned cargo ship Tsimtsum, flying Panamanian flag, sank July 2nd, 1977, in Pacific, four days out of Manila. Am in lifeboat. Pi Patel my name. Have some food, some water, but Bengal tiger a serious problem. Please advise family in Winnepeg, Canada. Any help very much appreciated. Thank you.
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Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.
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Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
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Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.
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Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? ... The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life.
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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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I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.
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How does one say in the jargon of musicology that my sould was pulled out of me and thrown up in the air, to be tossed about by the music. How does one say that I breathed, that I existed, in harmony with the ups and downs of those notes. What kind of notes both elevate and cast down, exalt and crush?
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I write slowly.
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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.
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For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.
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The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar. It was natural that, bereft and desperate as I was, in the throes of unremitting suffering. I should turn to God
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Work, work, work, but what mark do we leave, what point do we make? People who are too beholden to work become like erasers: as things move forward, they leave in their wake no trace of themselves.
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My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?
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'Bapu Gandhi said, 'All religions are true.' I just want to love God,' I blurted out, and looked down, red in the face.
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The taxidermist is a historian, dealing with an animal's past; the zookeeper is a politician, dealing with an animal's present; and everyone else is a citizen who must decide on that animal's future (...) The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.
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If I didn't have children, I think my life would be a failure.
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'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write.
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A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.
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I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.
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You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.