I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, ...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged ...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE ...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing ea...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE Commissioner Harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. This was his first child and it had...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot ha...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fa...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long ...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on y...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without judgment. A bath in the sea, a fuck with a s...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE For the first forty days a child
is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, MICHAEL ONDAATJE Girls with poison necklaces
to save themselves from torture.
Just as women wear amulets MICHAEL ONDAATJE I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discu...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spen...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE I have been seeing dragons again.
Last night, hunched on a beaver dam,
one held a body lik...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by ...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle.

Half my days I cannot bear to touch you...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are t...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again
MICHAEL ONDAATJE A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE I'll be looking at the moon,
but I'll be seeing you.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, ...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?"
MICHAEL ONDAATJE From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The ne...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expr...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They ...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE Could you fall in love with her if she wasn't smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than ...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE A novel is a mirror walking down a road
MICHAEL ONDAATJE You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he ca...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mo...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE ...the heart is an organ of fire.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue ...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make ...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before ...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear....
MICHAEL ONDAATJE All over the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling ...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE ...how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE I was fourteen then. He was eighteen. Everything is biographical, Lucien Freud says. What we make, w...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE There was some indecision as to when I was born. My sister said it was 1916. I'd lost my birth c...
MICHAEL GOUGH You can't escape this feeling of disintegration. The world is fragile. But you also can't le...
MICHAEL SHANNON You have to always remember who your guest is, and that's who we cater to.
MICHAEL MINA Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.
MICHAEL CAINE I don't think any other holiday embraces the food of the Midwest quite like Thanksgiving. There&...
MICHAEL SYMON We've certainly learned a lot of lessons from Katrina, from Rita. Rita was better than Katrina. ...
MICHAEL CHERTOFF There's Jay-Z, who morphs a certain street hustler's cool and indifference into CEO extravag...
MICHAEL PATERNITI When I see children, I see the face of God. That's why I love them so much. That's what I se...
MICHAEL JACKSON People write negatives things, cause they feel that's what sells. Good news to them, doesn't...
MICHAEL JACKSON Just because it's in print doesn't mean it's the gospel.
MICHAEL JACKSON Children show me in their playful smiles the divine in everyone. This simple goodness shines straigh...
MICHAEL JACKSON Well, especially now I come to realize - and then - I would do my schooling which was three hours wi...
MICHAEL JACKSON Well, you don't get to do things that other children get to do, having friends and slumber parti...
MICHAEL JACKSON Everything that I love is behind those gates. We have elephants, and giraffes, and crocodiles, and e...
MICHAEL JACKSON Please keep an open mind and let me have my day in court.
MICHAEL JACKSON Because I think every child star suffers through this period because you're not the cute and cha...
MICHAEL JACKSON There were times when I had great times with my brothers, pillow fights and things, but I was, used ...
MICHAEL JACKSON It's a complete lie, why do people buy these papers? It's not the truth I'm here to say....
MICHAEL JACKSON Because parents have power over children. They feel they have to do what their parents say. But the ...
MICHAEL JACKSON I'm never pleased with anything, I'm a perfectionist, it's part of who I am.
MICHAEL JACKSON But I will never stop helping and loving people the way Jesus said to.
MICHAEL JACKSON If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everyt...
MICHAEL JACKSON I'm happy to be alive, I'm happy to be who I am.
MICHAEL JACKSON Sound strategy starts with having the right goal.
MICHAEL PORTER That's one of the great things about Thanksgiving: Football's on!
MICHAEL STRAHAN I might be 'Candid Camera's number one fan.
MICHAEL CARBONARO To be able to detect the outbreak of avian flu anywhere in the world is going to require a partnersh...
MICHAEL BURGESS I hope the millions of people I've touched have the optimism and desire to share their goals and...
MICHAEL JORDAN The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the...
MICHAEL CONNELLY One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.
MICHAEL KORDA I'm a black American, I am proud of my race. I am proud of who I am. I have a lot of pride and d...
MICHAEL JACKSON In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or 'The Great War,' as i...
MICHAEL KORDA I joined Twitter and you read a lot of the comments. You're biting your lip and you want to repl...
MICHAEL OWEN Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyo...
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF I'm not good at being static. I have to be climbing a mountain.
MICHAEL OVITZ It's absolutely wrong that I don't want guys to challenge me. And the people who say that ar...
MICHAEL JORDAN Do I need my number retired throughout the course of the league to acknowledge what I've done? N...
MICHAEL JORDAN I've never been afraid to fail.
MICHAEL JORDAN There is no 'i' in team but there is in win.
MICHAEL JORDAN I don't want to be the flavor, the passing thing that the girls scream at. I think that it's...
MICHAEL BUBLE Yauch was a gifted MC.
MICHAEL DIAMOND Yauch was great at lacking fear.
MICHAEL DIAMOND I believed, up to last week, that Adam was somehow coming back. But I wouldn't trade that optimi...
MICHAEL DIAMOND The sport of shooting is my life.
MICHAEL DIAMOND Becoming an Olympian is the ultimate reward for any athlete.
MICHAEL DIAMOND Honestly achieved results surpass all others.
MICHAEL DIAMOND I find that it's best to take one step at a time and cross each bridge as they come to you.
MICHAEL STUHLBARG I hate leg exercises. I hate one-legged squats. I hate the hurdles and the split squats. I hate all ...
MICHAEL STRAHAN It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a doubl...
MICHAEL POLLAN Sometimes we spend more efforts with people that are strangers in terms of making an impression than...
MICHAEL DOUGLAS Growing up, there was only classical music on BBC Radio. We had to listen to the American Forces Net...
MICHAEL CAINE I'm just like anyone. I cut and I bleed. And I embarass easily.
MICHAEL JACKSON What modern humans need help with is escaping from the despair of politics, commerce and media, esca...
MICHAEL LEUNIG There's nothing like a family crisis, especially a divorce, to force a person to re-evaluate his...
MICHAEL DOUGLAS I'm a big supporter of the Second Amendment. But I think I have a First Amendment right not to b...
MICHAEL NUTTER In all of my work I'm trying to create a dialogue, in which I want to provoke the recipients, st...
MICHAEL HANEKE Horror fans need horror, okay? They don't need little worms squirming around going down your thr...
MICHAEL ROOKER The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle...
MICHAEL LEUNIG A man in a well tailored suit will always shine brighter than a guy in an off-the-rack suit.
MICHAEL KORS You can't regulate child labor. You can't regulate slavery. Some things are just wrong.
MICHAEL MOORE If you copy then it is not self-expression.
MICHAEL SCHENKER I'm not sure why I like cats so much. I mean, they're really cute obviously. They are both w...
MICHAEL SHOWALTER Let's not pretend that abortion isn't about the mass slaughter of innocents.
MICHAEL ASTON Access to books and the encouragement of the habit of reading: these two things are the first and mo...
MICHAEL MORPURGO Perhaps it is partly that we need to love books ourselves as parents, grandparents and teachers in o...
MICHAEL MORPURGO War continues to divide people, to change them forever, and I write about it both because I want peo...
MICHAEL MORPURGO The big relationships you make in your life are with those that you love and if things do go wrong t...
MICHAEL MORPURGO I was rather a poor student, too easily distracted - did a lot of gazing out of windows, fine for tr...
MICHAEL MORPURGO We all know that the great memories of our childhood are the little triumphs - it doesn't really...
MICHAEL MORPURGO By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to...
MICHAEL MORPURGO To write something you have to feel it and know it, and that's not comfortable.
MICHAEL MORPURGO Write because you love it and not because it is something that you think you should do. Always write...
MICHAEL MORPURGO One of the great failings of our education system is that we tend to focus on those who are succeedi...
MICHAEL MORPURGO Only the best books are special. Why? Because they open our eyes, touch us, excite us, extend us.
MICHAEL MORPURGO The most important thing is to live an interesting life. Keep your eyes, ears and heart open. Talk t...
MICHAEL MORPURGO Live an interesting life. Meet people. Read a lot and widely, learn from the great writers.
MICHAEL MORPURGO It is the child's understanding that teaches the adults the way of the future. They're still...
MICHAEL MORPURGO Read a lot - poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you wi...
MICHAEL MORPURGO Children have to be motivated to want to learn to read. Reading must not be taught simply as a schoo...
MICHAEL MORPURGO Encouraging young people to believe in themselves and find their own voice whether it's through ...
MICHAEL MORPURGO Something I learn every time I stand in front of a bunch of children, I learn never, never to undere...
MICHAEL MORPURGO Always write your ideas down however silly or trivial they might seem. Keep a notebook with you at a...
MICHAEL MORPURGO It is really important that focusing on things such as spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwritin...
MICHAEL MORPURGO My legacy would be that you don't have to give up anything. You can be chic but have a sense of ...
MICHAEL KORS Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you.
MICHAEL POLLAN 'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable...
MICHAEL SHEEN One of the most important days of my life was when I learned to ride a bicycle.
MICHAEL PALIN The first sign of real obsession with music was with an old wind-up gramophone that mum had thrown o...
GEORGE MICHAEL A lot of children are interested in fairies, especially young girls, and Tinker Bell is the ueber-fa...
MICHAEL SHEEN Once something is a passion, the motivation is there.
MICHAEL SCHUMACHER You use words like 'introvert' and 'extrovert,' various traits of a personality. A l...
MICHAEL FASSBENDER No life's worth more than any other, no sister worth less than any brother.
MICHAEL FRANTI To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest...
MICHAEL JORDAN Muftis and bishops should be like ripe camembert cheeses - a bit on the nose and not for the faint-h...
MICHAEL LEUNIG Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western ...
MICHAEL NOVAK I had very little fear about it, but basically, my straight friends talked me out of it. I think the...
GEORGE MICHAEL Social media changed Chinese mindset. More and more Chinese intend to embrace freedom of speech and ...
MICHAEL ANTI One of the most unusual shuttles operates at the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historic Site in Texas, ...
MICHAEL FROME A lot of my success comes from black music. It's something I'm very proud of.
MICHAEL BOLTON Black music has increased my enjoyment of what I do. It has increased my range, my ability to reach ...
MICHAEL BOLTON The entire business world has figured out how to make huge buckets of money without hiring us to wor...
MICHAEL MOORE As a kid, I watched 'Bugs Bunny' cartoons, and for some reason Pepe Le Pew, the indomitable ...
MICHAEL PATERNITI I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River&#...
MICHAEL KORYTA The United States contributes to peace in both by serving as a buffer between and among regional pow...
MICHAEL MANDELBAUM I used a kind of gray-green early on in my practice for painting steel, to make it look more like it...
MICHAEL GRAVES With 'Black Rain,' I spent a lot of time with homicide detectives, and I spent a lot of time...
MICHAEL DOUGLAS Never eat broccoli when there are cameras around.
MICHAEL STIPE I've always loved going to see Broadway shows. I've seen 'em all: Rent, Chorus Line, Cat...
MICHAEL SHOWALTER To this day, I believe the unity of the world's countries in the fight against terror is more powerf...
MICHAEL DELONG Talking about Apple v. Microsoft without mentioning the Internet and the browser is like talking abo...
MICHAEL ARRINGTON You can't be elected president without passing though Iowa and bowing down before corn-based eth...
MICHAEL POLLAN A boundary is really something artificial we made up. The ecosystem and landscape continue.
MICHAEL FROME I'm a career Air Force officer. We have a saying in the Air Force: 'If you want people to be...
MICHAEL HAYDEN For a brief moment, Ian Fleming made being an Englishman seem sexy, even to the French. He should ha...
MICHAEL KORDA In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the trut...
MICHAEL MUSTO Life does not happen to us, it happens from us.
MICHAEL WICKETT I moved from Moscow to Rome with my family and two bicycles in 1998, and spent a lot of that year- a...
MICHAEL SPECTER You get to about 65 or 70 and you lose friends and the world does seem to be an endlessly difficult ...
MICHAEL MORPURGO I have not much love for the bright lights - unless it's the sun creeping up over the horizon.
MICHAEL LEUNIG The French consider themselves the guardians of the world's culture and do not bother to hide th...
MICHAEL KORDA Something ancient in us bends us toward the origins of the whole thing. We either drown in the split...
MICHAEL MEADE Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.
MICHAEL WINTER The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while q...
MICHAEL KORDA We all fly. Once you leave the ground, you fly. Some people fly longer than others.
MICHAEL JORDAN The game is my wife. It demands loyalty and responsibility, and it gives me back fulfillment and pea...
MICHAEL JORDAN When I was young, I had to learn the fundamentals of basketball. You can have all the physical abili...
MICHAEL JORDAN You have to build up to green smoothies. Everyone loves fruit smoothies: you can add a handful of ba...
MICHAEL GREGER As you eat more healthily, your palate changes - it's amazing. Your taste buds constantly adapt:...
MICHAEL GREGER In my experience, people are usually fired for reasons having to do with budgetary constraints, inco...
MICHAEL SHERMER Some travelers collect souvenirs, postcards, or bumper stickers; I bring home a pencil from the vari...
MICHAEL DIRDA Proteins are the machinery of living tissue that builds the structures and carries out the chemical ...
MICHAEL BEHE My brothers were tremendous shack builders. My shacks were horrible. My brothers once built a two-st...
MICHAEL KEATON In order to have greater visibility of the larger cyber threat landscape, we must remove the governm...
MICHAEL MCCAUL I always thought of myself as a kind of literary bureaucrat. And that was never going to be enough f...
MICHAEL KORDA What I did, you know, being away from my family, letting so many people down. I let myself down, not...
MICHAEL VICK That wasn't the way that things was supposed to be. And all because the so-called culture that I...
MICHAEL VICK Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an ho...
MICHAEL ENDE In Eastern Europe, the past is not only always hovering over the present, it is not even passed. It ...
MICHAEL KORDA Up to a thousand milligrams of caffeine is considered safe for most people, which translates into ab...
MICHAEL GREGER T. E. Lawrence was far more than a glamorous, swashbuckling, heroic figure in flowing robes mounted ...
MICHAEL KORDA I still believe the lessons I learned when I was raised in a Roman Catholic household. Like, it'...
MICHAEL MOORE I first went to Cambodia in 2002, primarily, as it turned out, to change diapers. My wife had work i...
MICHAEL PATERNITI Going to Cambodia to cover the genocide trials, I did read a lot about the Khmer Rouge; I read a lot...
MICHAEL PATERNITI