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Michael Ondaatje Biography

Michael Ondaatje

Philip Michael Ondaatje, CC FRSL (/ɒnˈdɑːtʃiː/; born 12 September 1943), is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor and filmmaker. He is the recipient of multiple literary awards such as the Governor General's Award, the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Ondaatje is also an Officer of the Order of Canada, recognizing him as one of Canada's most renowned living authors.

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Michael Ondaatje Quotes

There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.

Lovers, Mapmakers, Named, Names, Travelled

But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.

Interested, Lives, Mean, Our Lives, Past

She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she slap breathes in light.

Dark, Lifts, Light, Match, Moving

I want the marginality to come into the center. This is the thing I was conscious of growing up, when I later lived in England. I saw all these war movies that came out shortly after the war, and they were all about the war being fought by Englishmen or Americans, there were no other "allies" in it - from India or Australia, etc.

Australia, Conscious, Englishmen, Fought, Growing Up, War

When I began to write novels, I wanted to keep that element of interaction with the reader that exists in poetry, not just for the reader to be shepherded from A to B to C to D but to participate, and the less you say sometimes, the better it is. You know, it's the way when someone speaks very quietly, you move forward so you can listen more carefully.

Exists, Interaction, Moving, Poetry, Sometimes, Writing

Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.

Air, Boat, Bridge, Fall, Jobs, Like

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

Know, Plot, Stories, Story, Theme

So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

Book, Gaps, Intently, Listened, Missing, Night

There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

Borders, Crosses, Hidden, Known, Lives, Our Lives

Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are?. . . But isn't it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love?. . . Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.

Brave New World, Falling In Love, Know, Seduce, Smart, Words

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.

Borders, Briefly, Dog, Forget Everything, Freud, Presence

You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.

Book, Creature, Lying, Pockets, Talk

when someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colors, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He's never sure what an eye reveals. but he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.

Character, Colors, Eye, Reaction, Simple

A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle. Half my days I cannot bear to touch you. The rest of my time I feel like it doesn’t matter if I will ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it’s how much you can bear. No date. No name attached.

Half, Handwriting, Names, Neat, See

There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.

Anger, Dance, Emotion, Literature, Music

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

Cities, Real, Seen, Way

All I ever wanted was a world without maps.

Life, Maps, World

Fathers die. You keep on loving them in any way you can. You can't hide him away in your heart.

Father, Fathers, Heart, Loving, Way

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.

Brother, Country, Fate, Feels, Met, Stand

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.

Expanded, Reduced, Tears, Told

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