Michael Ondaatje

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

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.

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

To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

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.

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you’re not.

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

It’s an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.

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

It’s why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

You don’t want to write your own opinion, you don’t want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.

I’m a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I’m a member of both countries.

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

A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.

It’s a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what’s beyond in the darkness, beyond where you’re writing.

In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient’s mind.

I don’t have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

It’s a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.

I don’t see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

When you’re writing, it’s as if you’re within a kind of closed world.

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.

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.

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.

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.