Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Truth is a nebulous thing. There are certain, definite truths, but the truth of our lives goes far beyond facts.
I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.
A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.
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.
The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape.
Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?
In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.
Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love.
Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born.
If you don't have dreams, how do you maneuver reality? Where do you get the ideas to change reality if not from dreams?
Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness.
Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed.
There are animals we haven't stopped by. Don't think they're harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.
It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.
I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.
The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving.
Christianity is a religion in a rush. Look at the world created in seven says. Even on a symbolic lovel, that's creation in frenzy.
Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.
I love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.
I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.
My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?
The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.
Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.
Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
A movie tends to box you in, at least as far as the aesthetics. You have an incredibly kinetic experience, which is the joy of cinema.
I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.
If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.
Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.
I was not wounded in any part of my body, but I had never experienced such intense pain, such a ripping of the nerves, such an ache of the heart.
Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness--how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!
It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion.
My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.
I ask you, is it the fig tree's fault that it's not the season for figs? What kind of thing is that to do to an innocent tree, wither it instantly?
I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.
Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.
India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it.
A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.
I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of 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.
I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.
Come aboard if your destination is oblivion- it should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat if you want. But it's a sad view.
Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.
I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.
Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.