Yann Martel
Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Failure
Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.Collection: Imagination
If I didn't have children, I think my life would be a failure.Collection: Failure
I love Canada. It's a wonderful political act of faith that exists atop a breathtakingly beautiful land.Collection: Faith
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.
Cinema is incredibly concise.
May books spread the world over!
Most of us get our history through story.
I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.
A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.
Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.
The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.
You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
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.
In all big cities the style of life is the same. Same endless array of restaurants; same big museums with the usual suspects; same anonymity, which can be thrilling when you're young but which I found got tiresome.
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.
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?
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.
A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.
Words are much better at relating emotions and thoughts.
Words aren't very good at describing complicated, strange visual things. You can try, and the reader will have some sort of image in their mind, but words aren't good at that.
The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.
I write slowly.
If a film project were available and the timing was right, I might be interested.
'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write.
I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.
The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.
I'm happy pretty well anywhere on this big, beautiful planet.
I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.
I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.
How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.
I'm still learning my craft.
I am not an autobiographical writer.
I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.
If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.
Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.
Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.Collection: Baseball
Don’t worry about being good…. Aspire to be authentic.Collection: Worry
To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.Collection: Life
You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.Collection: Inspiring
I can only tell my story, what you believe is up to you.Collection: Believe
It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.Collection: Letting Go
I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.Collection: Letting Go
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.Collection: Dream
If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.Collection: Pain
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.Collection: Stories
It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.Collection: Names
If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?Collection: Life