Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes

There are times my stories become - what I feel - not only accessible to hearing me on television, but they make wonderful reading.

For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.

People have asked me a lot, 'What comes first? The pictures or the story? The story or the picture?' It's hard to describe because often they seem to come at the same time. I'm seeing images while I'm thinking of the story.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

I feel like my brain is more geared towards a novel than it is to a movie.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page.

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.

Fiction is socially meaningful.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'