Quotes from Yann Martel

Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.

I'm still learning my craft.

To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity.

We are all born like Catholics, aren't we—in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?

In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.

My suffering left me sad and gloomy.

science can only take you so far and then you have to leap

My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.

Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness--how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!

Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling.

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.

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.

The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.

I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.

It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.

The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life.

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.

A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.

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.

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher.

It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.

It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.

It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.