Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje
Philip Michael Ondaatje, OC, is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet. He won the Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient, which was adapted as the 1996 film of the same name...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 September 1943
CountryCanada
kids writing giving
People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.
point state
You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.
falling-in-love fall doe
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
writing space people
There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
couple parent scary
I kind of was shoveled onto a boat at 11 and went to England. I didn't have any parent watching over me. It was very free and may have been a bit of a scary time for me, but I really don't remember much about the voyage apart from playing ping-pong a lot with a couple friends.
doors space people
I often need a limited space. It's like having a house to roam around in and reinvent and have things to happen in, kind of like a French farce. Doors opening, doors closing, new people arriving, and disappearing, and so forth.
growing-up war australia
I want the marginality to come into the center. This is the thing I was conscious of growing up, when I later lived in England. I saw all these war movies that came out shortly after the war, and they were all about the war being fought by Englishmen or Americans, there were no other "allies" in it - from India or Australia, etc.
next reason scene
There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.
patterns lists looks
If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.
together juxtaposition strange
I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.
country book believe
Politically I also don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction.
interesting childhood biographies
When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.
real cities way
Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
long too-much teach
I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read into hardly anything at all.