Ashwin Sanghi Quotes

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

I've wanted to write ever since I've gotten into comics. I wrote little things for myself when I was doing mini-comics and things, before becoming a professional. But I just figure at some point or another, I've got to make the leap. I just have to do it.

It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.

I can't even say I've begun yet, but I'm trying on the idea that there is a book in my future.

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel.

All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O'Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don't have that kind of wit and genius. We don't do that. We sit down and have some accidents.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.

If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web.

Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.

A lot of people, I think, harbor some kind of ambition to write a novel - they say, 'One day I'm going to write a novel,' and they maybe find the first three pages quite easy, and then they hit a kind of brick wall, and they think that that brick wall means that they're not a writer.

I always thought it would be so much fun to write a book.

I made the decision that I didn't want to spend my life in rooms and write about rooms, or else make books that are researched constructs. I think you do have to get out there and live it. Thriller and genre writers seem to understand this.

A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the intentions of a creature - to discover its true nature - other than by close and respectful observation?

I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.

I had never thought about writing a novel. But I had two young kids, and I realized that if I could write a novel, I could work at home.

I won't usually just sit down to write. I'd have done it in my head already. I visualise a story just like a film strip running in my head. I guess that is also a reason why my books have such a visual element to them. And it's what I tell young writers: plan your story ahead.

My method is, I just sit down and write a book.

Every single path is so different, but I would definitely say that the idea of what a writer is or should be is not a thing anymore. Everyone is redefining publishing, writing, and storytelling in general.

I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.