Art & Creativity Quote by Michael Ondaatje

Writing as someone else is less a costume change than a sensory upgrade. Ondaatje’s line frames fiction not as escapism but as a discipline of attention: the moment you inhabit a viewpoint that isn’t yours, you’re forced to notice the scaffolding you normally ignore. Your own habits of seeing become visible because you’re busy building a different set. That’s the “doubling” he’s after: you watch the world, and you watch yourself watching it.

The intent here is quietly polemical. In an era that treats authenticity as a kind of moral ID badge, Ondaatje argues for the opposite muscle: imaginative trespass, done with care. Writing from outside the self isn’t a betrayal of truth; it’s a method for finding more of it. The subtext is that the first-person “I” is not neutral or complete. Staying inside it risks a single-camera life. Switching perspective demands research, empathy, and restraint, but it also exposes the blind spots that personal experience can’t correct on its own.

Context matters: Ondaatje’s work (from The English Patient onward) is preoccupied with fragments, borders, and hybrid identities - people shaped by war, migration, and history’s aftershocks. For a writer like that, point of view is ethics as much as craft. “Someone you’re not” isn’t just a narrative trick; it’s a test of whether language can cross difference without flattening it. The line lands because it’s both a promise and a warning: the world gets larger, but only if you’re willing to be unsettled by it.