Michael Ondaatje Quotes

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

I think we need to tell stories that reflect our world.

I always find the more you can draw on real life characters, people, situations, it works better. Certainly for designing a character, I prefer to draw on real people rather than other guys I've seen in movies, rather than 'here's my version of Clint Eastwood' or whoever.

That was the beauty of 'Roseanne' and Roseanne herself. It could go dark; it could do issues.

I always want to tell the truth. It doesn't have to be a pretty truth, and it doesn't have to be a life-changing and life-threatening truth like 'Chi-Raq.' But I want to tell someone's truth in an effort to inspire people to see themselves reflected on the screen.

Film has to reflect the real world.

My songs are based on my keen observation. I have picked these situations from my surrounding and have presented a real situation about the youth and their mindset.

I don't want to protect my characters. I don't do it with Muslims, either. My job is not to make us look perfect. My job is to make us look messy.

I'm not interested in making 'black' movies. I'm interested in making movies that reflect reality as I perceive it.

Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.

but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.

If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize; just look... and paint what you see until the canvas ends.

I want my paintings to look like what's going on outside my window rather than what's inside my studio.

I want my fiction to feel real most of the time, so it makes sense to pay attention to life and to how people work.

There's a quote from Hamlet that is my guide... He tells the players not to exaggerate but to hold a mirror up to nature. Don't overdo it, don't underdo it. Do it just on the line.

To hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature.

All writers write about themselves, just as the old storytellers chose to tell stories that spoke to and about themselves. They call it the world, but it is themselves they portray. The world of which they write is like a mirror that reflects the inside of their hearts, often more truly than they know.

If your work is going to draw from life, you'd better work very hard to keep up with reality.

I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.

The comedy of each age holds up a mirror to the people of that age, a mirror that is unique.

Echo is the voice of a reflection in a mirror.

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

The true impressionism is realism. So many people do not observe.

Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.