Yann Martel

They are prime numbers.

That was my private symbolism.

And one day I did a reading and someone said, why did you choose 227 days?

They noticed it, which I thought was an odd thing to notice.

And I said, oh, well, it's a prime number.

I thought it was being super smart.

And the reader says, oh, and they looked disappointed.

And I said, well, sorry, what's wrong here?

And they said, oh, I thought it was 22 divided by seven is pi.

which I had never noticed.

I had never noticed that.

And it's happened in many, many other ways.

Even more embarrassing is initially when I wrote the book, when you're a writer, you're an engineer.

You're not the architect.

You're an engineer.

You want your structure to hold up to the wind that you're building.

And so very early on, first of all, when you write, my first two books did well critically, but there's, I didn't travel.

No one asked me about the book.

Suddenly with Life of Pi, people were asking about the book.

So they asked things like, you know, what does Richard Parker mean?