Top 33 Yann Martel Quotes

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.

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

I’m still learning my craft.

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

If a film project were available and the timing was right, I might be interested.

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

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.

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

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

I am not an autobiographical writer.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

‘Life of Pi’ was actually a very simple novel to write.

Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

Words are much better at relating emotions and thoughts.

If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.

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

Words aren’t very good at describing complicated, strange visual things. You can try, and the reader will have some sort of image in their mind, but words aren’t good at that.

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.

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

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.

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.

Cinema is incredibly concise.

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

Most of us get our history through story.

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

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

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