Anita Desai Quotes
Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed.
Isn't it strange how life won't flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood?
India is a curious place that still preserves the past, religions, and its history. No matter how modern India becomes, it is still very much an old country.
What a sense of possession, of confidence, it gave one to have pockets, to shove one's fists into them, as if in simply owning pockets one owned riches, owned independence.
My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly.
Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.
I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth.
...the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being.
I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.
When I was very young, I used to share much of what I wrote with my family, but as I got older and more self-conscious, it became a much more private process.
When I am writing, I focus one hundred percent on my writing. Then, by the time I'm half way through the book, I'm already thinking about the ending.
Do you know anyone who would - secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self - really prefer to return to childhood?
People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way.
The bougainvillea hung about it, purple and magenta, in livid balloons.