Guess quote

Michael Ondaatje [1943-0] Canadian

Rank: 103
Author, Novelist

Philip Michael Ondaatje, OC, is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet. He won the Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient, which was adapted as the 1996 film of the same name.

Chance, Home, Trust, War

Quote	Tags	Rank
It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.		101
That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.	Chance, War	102
It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.		103
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.		104
I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.	Home	105
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.		106
As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.		107
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.	Trust	108
I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.		109
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.		110
In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.		111
It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.		112
I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.		113
Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.		114
Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.		115
I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.		116
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.		117
It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.		118
The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.		119
When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.		120
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.		121
You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.		122
Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.		123
It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.		124
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.		125
The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.		126

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