Quotes by Yann Martel

About Yann Martel:

Yann Martel is an author best known for the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi, a #1 international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the New York Times Bestseller list. It was adapted to the screen by Ang Lee.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Yann Martel

How does one say in the jargon of musicology that my sould was pulled out of me and thrown up in the air, to be tossed about by the music. How does one say that I breathed, that I existed, in harmony with the ups and downs of those notes. What kind o...

Yann Martel

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

Yann Martel

Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting—that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art—and he had filled the ho...

Yann Martel

Afterwards, when it's all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?

Yann Martel

Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body.

Yann Martel

To my mind, faith is like being in the sun. When you are in the sun, can you avoid creating a shadow? Can you shake that area of darkness that clings to you, always shaped like you, as if constantly to remind you of yourself? You can’t. This shadow...

Yann Martel

...he found it where he should have looked first, on the Internet, which is a net indeed, one that can be cast further than the eye can see and be retrieved no matter how heavy the hall, its magical mesh never breaking under the strain but always bri...

Yann Martel

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

Yann Martel

Art is rooted in joy.

Yann Martel

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

Yann Martel

Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?

Yann Martel

Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.

Yann Martel

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

Yann Martel

As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people look...

Yann Martel

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

Yann Martel

When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither ...

Yann Martel

Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower.

Yann Martel

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.

Yann Martel

The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.

Yann Martel

Author Bio

  • NameYann Martel
  • DescriptionA Canadian author best known for the book Life of Pi
  • BornJune 25, 1963
  • CountryCanada
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • WorksLife Of Pi