Michael Ondaatje Quotes

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

I've always been a history buff. It was one of the few subjects at school that really, really caught me. I think you'll find a lot of actors will be interested in history because it sparks your imagination so much. When you enter a period of history, your imagination just goes wild in creating the world, which is really what acting is.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

History is always changing.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

Most of us, I think, are conscious of history swirling around outside the door, but when we're in the house, we're usually not dealing with history. We're not thinking about history.

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

The history of the past, a hundred years from now, won't be the history of the past that we learned in school because much more will have been revealed, and adjectives we can't even imagine will have been brought to bear on what we did learn in school.

I got history solidly under my belt, reading Russian history and biographies. I couldn't change the facts. I could only play with how the people might have responded to the facts of their lives.

The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.

History is nothing but a procession of false absolutes.

History is past politics, and politics present history.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals

You must read history forward and not backward.

Bubblegoth is about putting things together that don't necessarily go together.

For every person who can imagine a possibility there are tens of thousands who are stuck in the greased grooves of history.

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

Give your mind as long as possible to come up with something original.

I never work with one inspiration in mind. I like to take things from everywhere and piece it together. It's never a theme or a trick.