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

I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.

Yann Martel

I'm still learning my craft.

Yann Martel

Music moves me - duh - and that is like having a window opening on a heightened reality, but the effect is fleeting: When the music ends, the magic, the uplifting, vanishes and the window slams shut. Words, on the other hand, by the nature of how the...

Yann Martel

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

Yann Martel

I'm not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don't have a mobile. I just don't need things. I don't like things.

Yann Martel

Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.

Yann Martel

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

Yann Martel

Words are much better at relating emotions and thoughts.

Yann Martel

The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.

Yann Martel

If a film project were available and the timing was right, I might be interested.

Yann Martel

I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.

Yann Martel

A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.

Yann Martel

May books spread the world over!

Yann Martel

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

Yann Martel

I am not an autobiographical writer.

Yann Martel

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.

Yann Martel

If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.

Yann Martel

The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

Yann Martel

My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?

Yann Martel

It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.

Yann Martel

The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.

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