Quotes from Yann Martel

Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart.

Cinema is incredibly concise.

The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

I ask you, is it the fig tree's fault that it's not the season for figs? What kind of thing is that to do to an innocent tree, wither it instantly?

Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love.

A realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love.

I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.

The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.

As much as I love movies, it would be presumptuous of me to think that I know how to make one.

In all big cities the style of life is the same. Same endless array of restaurants; same big museums with the usual suspects; same anonymity, which can be thrilling when you're young but which I found got tiresome.

I write slowly.

I love Canada. Its a wonderful political act of faith that exists atop a breathtakingly beautiful land.

India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it.

The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar. It was natural that, bereft and desperate as I was, in the throes of unremitting suffering. I should turn to God

Bapu Gandhi said, 'All religions are true.' I just want to love God.

High calls low and low calls high. I tell you, if you were in such dire straits as I was, you too would elevate your thoughts. The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.

I'm not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don't have a mobile. I just don't need things. I don't like things.

I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.

Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.

May books spread the world over!

I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.

The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.