Michael Ondaatje Quotes

If you're well-known, you're at the risk of becoming your own character. When you're alone, as a writer, you have to be unknown, putting it all on the paper.

I would be more at peace if I could just record music and slide it under the door.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

If I could, I would not do anything else. I'd just be in the studio for my whole life. I would never go to parties, events, and red carpets. I would rather just be in the studio for the whole time. I don't even care. Nobody has to know what I look like. I just want to make music.

Painting puts me into an alpha state. It's a private event. I make all the decisions in the process and never have to deal with the outside world.

Jurgen loved London because he could get lost here. He said that it was the first time he could do that in eight years. No one knew him or bothered him. It is great for a person to be able to get lost.

I spent a lot of my childhood in my own head, making up stories. I didn't have a lot of outside influences, so I was able to make my own decisions about what I wanted to do.

France was very opposite of the show-business experience I'd been living; I was anonymous and alone. I wore no makeup, wore the same clothes every day. And I wrote and wrote and wrote.

By nature, I sit alone in a room and type... My goal was never celebrity.

Creating is a lonely thing in a lot of ways.

As a model, I didn't have an identity; I was a chameleon, a silent actress. I was an amorphous thing. I wasn't full of personality, I was full of solitude and solemnity. I wasn't a cover-girl type.

When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere. Which is how it should be.

I got in touch with the creative process between the age of 14 and 16, mainly because I was alone so much.

I lived a fairly average, anonymous small-town life till I got the idea to do Nine Inch Nails. Then I locked myself in a studio for a year, and then got off the tour bus two years after that, and I didn't know who I'd turned into.

It's an amazing feeling to go into a studio and really be alone.

Running is the one part of my life in which I fundamentally feel like the observer instead of the observed.

I just love the idea of going into a room and creating something by myself.

All good writing comes out of aloneness.

I'm just a guy up on a hill writing.

When you surprise yourself and you can't remember what the take felt like, then something transformative has happened.

I've never really had the opportunity to play something that's a complete departure from me yet.

New York was a fantastic place to disappear because no one cares who you are. No one bothers you. In my ten years living there I was never once asked for an autograph or stopped on the street. It was an absolute joy. I gave myself time and space to get to know myself more.

People forgot about us, which was what we wanted. We could be left alone without any pressure to make music.

At school, I was basically a loner, it was hard until I was 15 or so. Then I went to art school and was gifted with freedom to do the things I really wanted to do.