Art & Creativity Quote by Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje is giving away a craft secret that sounds almost like a confession: the writer’s “opinion” is rarely the most interesting thing on the page. The line swerves from the selfie-impulse of personal expression toward ventriloquism, where the self becomes legible only when it’s displaced into another voice, another body, another set of stakes. It’s not humility so much as strategy. An author who lectures you from the pulpit of their own certainty shrinks the world; an author who routes their sensibility through a character lets contradiction, desire, and blind spots do the heavy lifting.

The subtext is an argument against autobiography-as-authority. “Represent yourself through someone else” doesn’t mean hiding; it means choosing the richer kind of exposure. When you inhabit a soldier, a lover, an immigrant, a thief, your values can’t stay abstract. They have to survive weather, boredom, temptation, power. Your beliefs get stress-tested by plot. Readers don’t feel persuaded; they feel implicated.

Context matters because Ondaatje’s work (think The English Patient) is built on fragmentation, multiple perspectives, and the ethical tension of telling other people’s stories. He’s attentive to how identity is assembled from memory, rumor, history, and desire. In that light, the quote doubles as a warning: direct self-representation can be narcissism or propaganda; indirect self-representation can be empathy, but also appropriation if done lazily. The intent is to push writers toward the harder, more accountable form of honesty: not declaring what you think, but constructing a human situation where what you think becomes unavoidable.