Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Ondaatje

Fiction, in Ondaatje's formulation, isn't escapism; it's a controlled way to fracture the self into disputing parties. "Argue with yourself" is a sly admission that the writer's mind is not a serene wellspring of wisdom but a noisy committee. Characters become legal briefs you can cross-examine. Give one a hunger for order, another a taste for ruin, and suddenly your private contradictions have voices, habits, and alibis. The line flatters craft while quietly demystifying it: creation as a technique for thinking, not a lightning bolt of inspiration.

Ondaatje's work has often circled memory, violence, and the stories people tell to survive them. In that context, the "argument" isn't a parlor debate; it's an ethical pressure test. When history is messy and motives are mixed, a single authorial viewpoint starts to look like propaganda. Characters let you stage competing truths without announcing which one wins. That's also why the sentence lands with such economy: it frames artistry as self-interrogation, a refusal to let the writer become a dictator over meaning.

There's subversive humility in the joke, too. Writers are stereotyped as omniscient; Ondaatje implies they're more like moderators. The character isn't just a puppet, it's an opponent that forces revision, doubt, and surprise. The intent is less "invent people" than "invent resistance" - because the most interesting art happens when the creator can't quite bully the page into agreeing.