Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje’s confession is a quiet rebuke to the culture of prepackaged “storytelling,” where every novel must be pitched as a clean arc with a theme that can fit on a bookstore placard. He’s not romanticizing chaos so much as protecting the part of writing that feels most alive to him: attention before explanation. Plot, story, theme - the holy trinity of workshop talk - are presented as aftereffects, the residue left once language, image, and voice have done their real work.

The intent is practical and polemical at once. Practically, he’s describing a process that begins with texture: a scene fragment, a line of sound, a sensuous detail, an obsession. Polemically, he’s pushing back against the idea that art’s value is measured by how efficiently it delivers meaning. In Ondaatje’s work, especially where memory and history are jagged rather than linear, “not knowing” isn’t ignorance; it’s a method. It allows accidents, contradictions, and gaps - the very things real lives are made of - to survive long enough to shape the book.

Subtext: theme is often what writers impose to feel in control, or what markets demand to feel certain. Ondaatje delays that closure. He’s staking a claim for discovery over blueprint, for writing as excavation rather than architecture. The line also gently demystifies genius: the authority comes later, after the wandering, when the material finally reveals what it’s been about all along.