Art & Creativity Quote by Michael Ondaatje

Order, for Ondaatje, is the quickest route to dead air. That refusal to “have a plan” isn’t a cute writerly quirk; it’s a manifesto against the corporate fantasy that art is just project management with better lighting. The second sentence does the real work: “I would get quite bored carrying it out.” The emphasis isn’t on difficulty or discipline but on boredom, a word that treats premeditated plotting as a kind of spiritual anesthesia. If the writer already knows the ending, the act of writing becomes clerical, a mere fulfillment of an outline’s promises.

The subtext is that discovery is the engine of his work, and not just for the audience. Ondaatje’s novels and poems often feel assembled from flashes: memory, sensuous detail, historical fragments, the way a life is actually recalled rather than cleanly narrated. That aesthetic depends on surprise and risk. A plan would harden the material too early, turning living texture into architecture. He’s defending a process where the sentence can change the destination, where character and image take authority away from the author’s initial intention.

Context matters: Ondaatje emerges from poetry, where the line is a unit of thought and sensation, not a step in a blueprint. His stance also quietly rejects the contemporary demand for “content” that arrives predictable and on schedule. The wit is in how casually he frames rebellion as self-preservation. He’s not romanticizing chaos; he’s admitting that for him, boredom is the real enemy, and the only cure is to write into the unknown.