Top 26 Quotes by Michael Ondaatje

The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

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

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.

To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.

The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.

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.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

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.