Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes

Blank paper has always inspired me.

I'm at the mercy of whatever character comes into my head.

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.

A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially.

Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

I tell my writing students that everything is material; just pay attention.

I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.

I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

I've just been writing stuff down as it comes to me. I haven't thought, 'Let me write some major opus here.'

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.