Quotes from Yann Martel

Words aren't very good at describing complicated, strange visual things. You can try, and the reader will have some sort of image in their mind, but words aren't good at that.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.

You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.

How true is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.

There's no peace like the peace of an inner courtyard on a sunny day.

The presence of God is the finest of rewards.

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God... These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside.

Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.

If you take two steps towards God,' he used to tell me, 'God runs to you!

The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving.

I have a story that will make you believe in God.

Don't worry about being good…. Aspire to be authentic.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

Sitting in an office for TOO long is not natural, perhaps, so that's why we should change it. I didn't say that out-and-out capitalism, which reduces humanity to dollar figures, is natural.

I'm happy pretty well anywhere on this big, beautiful planet.

Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.

I've never forgotten him. Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart. I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. The pain is like an axe that chops my heart.

I'm still learning my craft.

If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.

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