You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
Michael OndaatjeWhat is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
Michael OndaatjeNowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.
Michael OndaatjeJung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.
Michael OndaatjeIf she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.
Michael OndaatjeMeanwhile with the help of an anecdote I fell in love. Words caravaggio. They have a power.
Michael OndaatjeShe moved from being a young woman into having the angular look of a queen, someone who has made her face with her desire to be a certain kind of person. He still likes that about her. Her smartness, the fact that she did not inherit that look or that beauty, but it was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character.
Michael OndaatjeShe had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
Michael OndaatjeThere's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.
Michael OndaatjeResearch can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
Michael OndaatjeYou can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
Michael OndaatjeShe entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
Michael OndaatjeHe has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
Michael OndaatjeShe is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.
Michael OndaatjeBut we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.
Michael OndaatjeI am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.
Michael OndaatjeIt's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.
Michael OndaatjeBetween the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.
Michael Ondaatje