Michael Ondaatje Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Book, Character, Writing

• 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.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Book, Writing, Discovery

• It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, Views, Perception

• A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, Lovers, Blind

• If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Notebook, Writing, Cat

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The English Patient”, p.51, A&C Black

• When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, World, Kind

• As someone who writes novels that are often set in other periods of time or other ages or other landscapes, there's a certain element of research I have to do, and often, the more laconic people are, the more interesting they become.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, People, Interesting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, Would Be

• When I began to write novels, I wanted to keep that element of interaction with the reader that exists in poetry, not just for the reader to be shepherded from A to B to C to D but to participate, and the less you say sometimes, the better it is. You know, it's the way when someone speaks very quietly, you move forward so you can listen more carefully.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Moving, Writing, Sometimes

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, Want, Opinion

• I see myself as someone who's been saved by writing. God knows what I would have been, become or how I would have ended up without it.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, God Knows, Saved

• I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, Doors, Novel

• People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, Kids, People

  "Michael Ondaatje, Among Thieves". Interview with Maddie Oatman, www.motherjones.com. September/October 2011.

• There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, Space, People

  "Michael Ondaatje, Among Thieves". Interview with Maddie Oatman, www.motherjones.com. September/October 2011.

• I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, Bored, Stories

• I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, Thinking, Hands

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, Ideas, Right Now

• When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Writing, Plot, Stories

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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