Quotes from Yann Martel

I concluded, that it was not a dream or a delusion or a misplaced memory or a fancy or any other falsity, but a solid, true thing witnessed while in a weakened highly agitated state.

The most beautiful rooms I have entered have been empty ones. Warehouses full of light and dust. Empty attics with a view. Coastlines. Prairies.

There are no grounds for going beyond a scientific explanation of reality and no sound reason for believing anything but our sense experience. A clear intellect, close attention to detail and a little scientific knowledge will expose religion as superstitious bosh. God does not exist. -- Why tolerate darkness? Everything is here and clear, if only we look carefully.

Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It's the end. If the watch doesn't work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us.

I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.

Then Richard Parker, companion of my torment, awful, fierce thing that kept me alive, moved forward and disappeared forever from my life.

He's a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.

Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can

The men nodded vigorously at me. When they took hold of me and lifted me in their strong arms, I thought nothing of it. I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil within that has been let out.

I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.

There's nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.

But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.

It was a placid explosion of orange and red, a great chromatic symphony, a colour canvas of supernatural proportions, truly a splendid Pacific sunset, quite wasted on me.

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity - it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous possessive love that grabs at it what it can.

I'm just trying to help Do your uncle's bonsai eat meat? I don't think so Have you ever been bitten by one of his bonsai? No. In that case, your uncle's bonsai are not helping us

Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness.

A good zoo is a place of carefully worked-out coincidence: exactly where an animal says to us, Stay out!...we say to it, Stay in! with our barriers. Under such conditions of diplomatic peace, all animals are content and we can relax and have a look at each other.

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence were something weak and helpless.

What don't we realize is that we are a strange and forbidding species to wild animals. We fill them with fear. They avoid us as much as possible. It took centuries to still the fear in some pliable animals – domestication it's called – but most cannot get over their fear, and I doubt they ever will. When wild animals fight us, it is out of sheer desperation. They fight when they feel they have no other way out.

I thought I would run out of paper. It was the pens that ran out.

Remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.

Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilerated speechlessness.

Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.