It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
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.
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.
I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.
I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people’s minds.
You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.
The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
A realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.
Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.
My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.
Sitting in an office for TOO long is not natural, perhaps, so that’s why we should change it. I didn’t say that out-and-out capitalism, which reduces humanity to dollar figures, is natural.
We think we live in a global village. We don’t. The world is a big and beautiful and incredibly varied place. It can only be known locally, with your two feet on the ground. We should stick to our own gardens, as Voltaire said.
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!
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.
Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
It is a vast country, so that inspires you. It’s also the greatest hotel on earth: It welcomes people from everywhere. It’s a good country to write from because in many ways Canada is the world.
I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.