Michael Ondaatje quotes
1943 – · Sri Lanka / Canada, 20th–21st century · poet, novelist, essayist
About Michael Ondaatje
Born in Colombo on 12 September 1943, Ondaatje moved to England as a child and to Canada in 1962. Beginning as a poet in the 1960s, he wrote hybrid prose and historical novels—including The English Patient (1992)—examining migration, memory and reconstruction of the past.
Works: The Dainty Monsters; The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; In the Skin of a Lion; The English Patient
Quotes
“The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.”
Source: In the Skin of a Lion, 1987 · Check the source
Verified attributionWhat we know
- What is documented
- The sentence appears in Michael Ondaatje’s novel In the Skin of a Lion and is printed in a passage that continues, “Meander if you want to get to town.”
From In the Skin of a Lion, the line asks readers to trust a story that works slowly and subtly. It’s metafictional: the novel promises not a neat plot but a faint, humane order that emerges from overlapping lives and fragments of history.