Michael Ondaatje Writing Quotations

There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.

People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.

A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out

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.

To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.

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

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

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

I see myself as someone who's been saved by writing. God knows what I would have been, become or how I would have ended up without it.

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

If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.

When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.

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.

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

I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.

One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.