Yann Martel Quotes

It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

Every author that creates is a liar;literature is a lie,but from that lie, a recreation of reality is born. Therefore, recreating reality is one of the fundaments of creation.

You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

This is why fiction is an art, and life is not - how much more affecting is the lie than the truth.

I take inspiration from my life but only twenty per cent is real the rest is all made up.

All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.

It's kind of strange-- in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it.

Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion.

This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

No photographer should be blamed when, instead of capturing reality, he tries to show things he has seen only in his imagination. Photography is the youngest art form. All attempts to enlarge its frontiers are important and should be encouraged.

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

You have to use fantasy to show different sides to reality. That's how it can bend.

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.

Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.

A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.

Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were