Michael Ondaatje Quotes

An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.

Everything I write is about me.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.

I have never dissected my personal life. What sense would it make?

The bigger confrontation is the one an individual has with itself.

The searching for our selves is the most agonizing, isn't it? - and yet the most stimulating - and one simply cannot escape it.

I've been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It's boring.

One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough?

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.

When people don't have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.

I work because I have issues and questions and feelings and thoughts that I want to have a look at. I'm not in need of, or wanting, particularly, to know what other folk are up to.

Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.

I love books, and all the best ones are people analysing their own emotions. You can learn from that.

I don't know how often I can discuss one incident in my entire life, but I'll continue to do that.

I'm not going to lie, there are more interesting ways to spend your time than answering questions about yourself. But if there were no questions to ask me, I might have a beef with that.

Much of the time, we're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves into the world. And we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves.

I write from my life, my experience. I'm selfish that way.

The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.

I don't know what other people are doing - I just know about me.