Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

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.

In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.

Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.

Sadness is very close to hate.

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.

All I ever wanted was a world without maps.

That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

The one of the great sadnesses of any life is knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

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.

How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.

Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.