Yann Martel

We're very technocratic in our age.

And they explain, and they're small, and they're modest.

The present has the modesty of a footnote.

One of my favorite lines in the book is, we're all footnotes to a greater story.

Each one carries a little tiny story that we maybe feel is insignificant, but collectively, we are it.

We are our nations, not only our families, but our nation is made up of this tight weave of individual stories, of individual footnotes.

So I wanted that, and that liberated me right away.

I could tell the grand epic and these little technical footnotes.

That would be a mistake in this one.

And you know where I got it?

People keep on bringing Pale Fire to me, Nabokov's book.

I tell people, you know, if a poet goes to a woods in Vermont, writes a poem, doesn't mean he's influenced by Robert Frost.

He just happened to be in a woods in Vermont and wrote a poem.

So Pale Fire, which is in verse and has commentary at the end.

I read it afterwards.

I'd read other Nabokov.

It's just a coincidence.

The one that actually brought, first of all, I don't know if they're totally academic technical, but sometimes they tell other stories.

And I like how they piggyback on a main story.

The one that really brought footnotes, the grandeur of the footnote to me is The Divine Comedy.