Yann Martel Quotes
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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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'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?
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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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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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If I didn't have children, I think my life would be a failure.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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I love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.
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My greatest wish - other than salvation - was to have a book.
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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.
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Music moves me - duh - and that is like having a window opening on a heightened reality, but the effect is fleeting: When the music ends, the magic, the uplifting, vanishes and the window slams shut. Words, on the other hand, by the nature of how they work, emotions evoked by dint of carefully laid out thoughts, have a more lingering effect.
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I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.