Quotes from Michael Ondaatje

I promised to tell you how one falls in love.

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.

It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.

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.

the heart is an organ of fire

A blind lover, don't knowwhat I love till I write it out

So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.

He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.

The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.

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

There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.

It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

Death means you are in the third person.

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.

To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

It's better to die laughing than to live each moment in fear.

In every Heart...awaits Your Angel.

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.

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

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.

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

You think that you are an iconoclast, but you're not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.