Yann Martel Quotes
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Words are much better at relating emotions and thoughts.
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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?
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You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
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There are animals we haven't stopped by. Don't think they're harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
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I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.
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I write slowly.
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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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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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My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
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I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.
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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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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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In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.
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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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The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.
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Here was irrefutable proof that he was using the Holocaust to speak of the extermination of animal life. Doomed creatures that could not speak for themselves were being given the voice of a most articulate people who had been similarly doomed. He was seeing the tragic fate of animals through the tragic fate of Jews. The Holocaust as allegory.
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I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.
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It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.
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I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
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Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?
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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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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 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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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.