Michael Ondaatje

“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”

“We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.”

“I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed...”

“There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This...”

“I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn...”

“-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover? I said nothing. -Deny it,damn you!”

“Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.”

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fear...”

“This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.”

“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from...”

“As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.”

“I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.”

“That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.”

“I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.”

“I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.”

“Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.”

“A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.”

“Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.”