Michael Ondaatje Quotes

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

I don't want to draw from my own experiences in life. I first like to become the character and then think from her point of view.

In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse.

I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

As a writer, it is my job to tell a story. I don't want to get involved in social commentary; I just want to show issues from a different point of view. I want to show issues from a perspective that may not be highlighted.

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.

When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.

What I love about my work is that I'm forced to look through my character's eyes.

What's nice about acting is that you're not just left with yourself all the time, but you get to see the world through so many different people's eyes.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

I think I was probably able to flip characters in my head as if I was playing different roles in order to write the different people because you kind of have to be one person, and inhabit him and write from his voice and be her and write her voice. So I think that helped.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

I always do make a back story for myself, but I'm not sure how necessary it is. I just like to.

When you play a character, you get to see the world through their eyes. Whether it's a fictional world or a real world, you do get to see somebody else's point of view, whether he's a good guy or a bad guy.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.

Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.

It's great fun if you get a good piece of writing and you can pretend to be someone else, tell a story that needs to be told, make some kind of connection. I've always fancied myself as a leading man, but I really doubt whether anyone else sees me that way.

I love creating characters and becoming someone else entirely.

There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.