YANN MARTEL

If I didn't have children, I think my life would be a failure.

I am not an autobiographical writer.

In all big cities the style of life is the same. Same endless array of restaurants; same big museums with the usual suspects; same anonymity, which can be thrilling when you're young but which I found got tiresome.

If a film project were available and the timing was right, I might be interested.

I write slowly.

The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.

The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.

Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.

'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write.

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.

I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.

I'm not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don't have a mobile. I just don't need things. I don't like things.

Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling.

If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.

You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.

It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.

Words aren't very good at describing complicated, strange visual things. You can try, and the reader will have some sort of image in their mind, but words aren't good at that.

Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.

May books spread the world over!

I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.