Yann Martel Quotes
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If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?
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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 you fall into a lion's pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it's hungry-be assured, zoo animals are amply fed-or because it's bloodthirsty, but because you've invaded it's territory.
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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.
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Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.
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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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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. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up.
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'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write.
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Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?
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Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team.
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You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
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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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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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I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It's a terrible burden to carry. All sentient life is sacred.
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We are all born like Catholics, aren't we—in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?
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I couldn't get Him out of my head. Still can't. I spent three solid days thinking about Him. The more He bothered me, the less I coul forget Him. And the more I learned about Him, the less I wanted to leave Him.
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That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
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If I didn't have children, I think my life would be a failure.
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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.
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Sitting in an office for TOO long is not natural, perhaps, so that's why we should change it. I didn't say that out-and-out capitalism, which reduces humanity to dollar figures, is natural.
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It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
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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.
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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.
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Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion - and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.