Ruth Ozeki Quotes

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Ruth Ozeki

Profession : Novelist

Birth : March 12, 1956

People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.

Ruth Ozeki

I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.

Ruth Ozeki

The relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal in a way. We co-create each other. We are constantly emerging out of the relationship we have with others.

Ruth Ozeki

Maybe all teenagers feel like they don't fit in. I never felt like a cool kid. I remember being bullied for being Asian.

Ruth Ozeki

The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.

Ruth Ozeki

For a writer, you definitely do not want to be in the mainstream. You want to be on the edge because that's where the vantage point is. That's where you can see.

Ruth Ozeki

My mind is like a gyre, and odd juxtapositions happen.

Ruth Ozeki

I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly.

Ruth Ozeki

For me, writing is a way of thinking. I write in a journal a lot. I'm a very impatient person, so writing and meditation allow me to slow down and watch my mind; they are containers that keep me in place, hold me still.

Ruth Ozeki

Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.

Ruth Ozeki

Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and it's hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.

Ruth Ozeki

There's something about the idea of writing, and thinking about writing as a form of prayer - the way as a writer you call out into the world and throw your words into the world. You're not praying to a god, but you're almost conjuring a reader to arrive. That's what books do: they're an invitation to readers.

Ruth Ozeki

Writing is solitary. You spend so much time alone and in your own mind, telling stories.

Ruth Ozeki

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

Ruth Ozeki

I am really interested in the way we relate to time. In particular, the way readers and writers talk to each other. Casting your voice out into the future is very beautiful to me.

Ruth Ozeki

When I'm writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write.

Ruth Ozeki

There's something about Vonnegut's deadpan irony that I really like. And I like Borges' puzzle structure.

Ruth Ozeki

I live in a beautiful part of British Columbia, and I run through the rainforest. I do have to look over my shoulder to check for a cougar or a wolf though, so sometimes it's not the most relaxing.

Ruth Ozeki

Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.

Ruth Ozeki

I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.

Ruth Ozeki