Amish Tripathi Quotes

I'm not sure if I always wanted to be a writer, but I was always writing.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

I never try to convey a message, I just want to tell a story. Why that story in particular? I have no idea, but I have learned to surrender to the muse. I become obsessed with a theme or with certain stories; they haunt me for years, and finally, I write them.

I hadn't ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six months before I started work on 'Elsewhere' that I would never write a novel.

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.

There is a myth that writers get to choose their stories. You don't get to choose your story any more than you get to choose your children. You can make the decision to write, but beyond that, at the end of the day, it's going to come out how it's going to come out.

Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

Originally I had planned to write just a couple of children's books and then, return the focus on adult literature. A funny thing happened along the way - I kept having new ideas, and then I looked up one day, and 30 years had passed!

There are a few really fantastic stories left, and that kind of gives you some inspiration to find even new ones.

I was very fortunate that my first novel captivated the imaginations of so many readers who asked for a sequel. After that, one book led to another as I discovered other facets to my characters I wanted to investigate further.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

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.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

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

I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.

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.'

Stories develop from things I read and also from my own experiences and experiences of people I know.