Yann Martel quotes:

Music moves me - duh - and that is like having a window opening on a heightened reality, but the effect is fleeting: When the music ends, the magic, the uplifting, vanishes and the window slams shut. Words, on the other hand, by the nature of how they work, emotions evoked by dint of carefully laid out thoughts, have a more lingering effect.

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

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.

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it you would be amazed at the animals that fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants, in untold numbers. There is no doubt in my mind that that feral giraffes and feral hippos have been living in Tokyo for generations without seeing a soul.

I love Canada. It's a wonderful political act of faith that exists atop a breathtakingly beautiful land.

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.

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

Most of us get our history through story.

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.

These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy...walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, 'Business as usual.' But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

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.

Cinema is incredibly concise.

Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? ... The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life."

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.

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

Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

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

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.

Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr.Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.

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

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.

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

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

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

I'm happy pretty well anywhere on this big, beautiful planet.

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.

[T]o be a castaway is to be caught up in grim and exhausting opposites.

I felt I was beating a rainbow to death

I tell you, to be drunk on alcohol is disgraceful, but to be drunk on water is noble and ecstatic."

We always see the Holocaust in terms of black-and-white images, barking Germans, cowering Jews. We know very well-known fixed places like Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, and Beltzec. Instead, war can live in a couple having a spat, when we say, "That was a real war." We very rarely have the Holocaust live in the terms of today. And I think that's a problem, because it becomes ancient history.

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.

If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?

Japanese-owned cargo ship Tsimtsum, flying Panamanian flag, sank July 2nd, 1977, in Pacific, four days out of Manila. Am in lifeboat. Pi Patel my name. Have some food, some water, but Bengal tiger a serious problem. Please advise family in Winnepeg, Canada. Any help very much appreciated. Thank you.

Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? ... The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life.

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.

It was as unbelievable as the moon catching fire.

You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.

Dawn came and matters were worse for it. Because now, emerging from the darkness, I could see, what before I had only felt, the great curtains of rain crashing down on me from towering heights and the waves that threw a path over me and trod me underfoot one after another.

The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.

Just beyond the ticket booth Father had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain. There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the curtain that we had to replace it regularly. Behind it was a mirror.

We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite.

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.

I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving. I was weeping because ....fill in the blank with whatever/whoever helped you survive... had left me so unceremoniously.

I couldn't get Him out of my head. Still can't. I spent three solid days thinking about Him. The more He bothered me, the less I coul forget Him. And the more I learned about Him, the less I wanted to leave Him.

If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

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 love Canada...It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.

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 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.

For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right.

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.

My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanour - calm, quiet and introspective - did something to soothe my shattered self.

You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it wont be for long.

I can well imagine an athiest's last words: "White, white! L-L-Love! My God!" - and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying "Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain," and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.

Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud...

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life.

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.

No one dies of nausea, but it can seriously sap the will to live.

How true is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.

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.

The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea.

My gratitude to him is as boundless as the Pacific ocean.

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.

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!

The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.

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.

Cinta sulit dipercaya, tanyakan pada siapapun yang sedang jatuh cinta.Kehidupan ini juga sulit dipercaya, tanyakan pada ilmuwan manapun.Tuhan juga sulit dipercaya, tanyakan pada siapapun yang memercayainya.Kenapa Anda tidak menerima hal-hal yang sulit dipercaya?

...if you fall into a lion's pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it's hungry-be assured, zoo animals are amply fed-or because it's bloodthirsty, but because you've invaded it's territory.

At last I managed to haul it aboard. It was over three feet long. The bucket was useless. It would fit the dorado like a hat.

Of hunger and thirst, thirst is the greater imperative.

I thought I knew not only her habits but also her limits. This display of ferocity, of savage courage, made me realize that I was wrong. All my life I had known only a part of her.

There are animals we haven't stopped by. Don't think they're harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

Mockery be damned, my urine looked delicious.

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.

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?

What a terrible disease that must be if it could kill God in a man.

The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.

Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap.

I became aware of a voice inside my head. [...] It was only later that I realized that this voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself.

Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer?

..the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.

Readers will easily recognize the cover of a book they've read, but in a cafe that man over there, is that...is that...well, it's hard to tell - doesn't he have long hair? - oh, he's gone.

Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited.

Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower.

Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.

Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous possessive love that grabs at what it can.

When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It's a terrible burden to carry. All sentient life is sacred.

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

At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.

Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!

I have a fierce will to live. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others - and I am one of those - never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end.

I turned around, stepped over the Zebra and threw myself overboard.

[The taxidermist is] a historian, dealing with an animal's past; the zookeeper is a politician, dealing with an animal's present; and everyone else is a citizen who must decide on that animal's future (...) The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.

I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

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.

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

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 are much better at relating emotions and thoughts.

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

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

...animals don't escape from somewhere but from something

...for everything has a trace of the divine in it.

A house is a compressed territory where our basic needs can be fulfilled close by and safely.

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.

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

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.

A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.

A zoo is not an ideal place for an animal - of course the best place for a chimp is the wilds of Tanzania - but a good zoo is a decent, acceptable place. Animals are far more flexible than we realize. IF they weren't, they wouldn't have survived. But my opinion about zoos came after research. Initially I had the opinion that most people have, that they are jails.

Afterwards, when it's all over, you meet God. What do you say to God?

And in between the two, in between the sky and the sea, were all the winds. And there were all the nights and all the moons. To be a castaway is to be a point perpetually at the centre of a circle. However much things may appear to change-the sea may shift from whisper to rage, the sky might go from fresh blue to blinding white to darkest black-the geometry never changes. Your gaze is always a radius. The circumference is ever great. In fact, the circles multiply. To be a castaway is to be caught in a harrowing ballet of circles.

And what of my extended family-birds, beasts, and reptiles? They too have drowned. Every single thing I value in life has been destroyed. And I am allowed no explanation? I am to suffer hell without any account from heaven? In that case, what is the purpose of reason, Richard Parker? Is it no more than to shine at practicalities-the getting of food, clothing and shelter? Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch? (pg. 98)