Yann Martel Quotes

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Yann Martel

Profession : Author

Birth : June 25, 1963

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

Yann Martel

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

Yann Martel

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

Yann Martel

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.

Yann Martel

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

Yann Martel

You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.

Yann Martel

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.

Yann Martel

I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.

Yann Martel

I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.

Yann Martel

If I didn't have children, I think my life would be a failure.

Yann Martel

Cinema is incredibly concise.

Yann Martel

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

Yann Martel

Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

Yann Martel

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

Yann Martel

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.

Yann Martel

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.

Yann Martel

May books spread the world over!

Yann Martel

Music moves me - duh - and that is like having a window opening on a heightened reality, but the effect is fleeting: When the music ends, the magic, the uplifting, vanishes and the window slams shut. Words, on the other hand, by the nature of how they work, emotions evoked by dint of carefully laid out thoughts, have a more lingering effect.

Yann Martel

My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?

Yann Martel

It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.

Yann Martel