373 Quotes by Michael Ondaatje

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.

A novel is a mirror walking down a road.

There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult. There was some little waltz in the way he spoke to her and the way he thought.

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.

He came to this country like a torch on fire and he swallowed air as he walked forward and he gave out light.

I was about to enter a borderless terrain between adolescence and adulthood.

She must have perceived how one could darken and make invisible or at least distant what is unhappy or dangerous in a life; I think her eventual skill with limelight and fictional thunder allowed her to clarify for herself what was true and what was false, safe and unsafe.

In my work I sometimes borrow Claire’s nature, as well as her careful focus on the world.

This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else’s poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you.