Yann Martel

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.

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

I am not an autobiographical writer.

It's a terrifying thing to be perhaps 16 or 17 and feel like you are a failure and a has-been.

Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's just a cycle.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.