Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Quotes

Part of me wonders what it would have been like to have had my first experience of India in a normal way, rather than through the eyes of a film.

India is decidedly not anything that was part of my upbringing or part of my experience or part of my preparation. I really fell into it the way one should fall into it, you know - through love.

I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.

I've never had a particularly sweet tooth. In fact, during the war, I used to swap my sweet ration coupons with my father - and he'd give me his clothing coupons in return. Looking good was more important to me than scoffing sweets.

Filming in India was very special. The chaos, the noise, and the sensory overload was all really wonderful. It was a new world to me, and being able to capture that was incredible.

The information glut has become a ruling cliche. As all resources - from energy to information - become more abundant, the presure of economic scarcity falls ever more heavily on one key residual, and that single shortage looms ever more stringent and controlling. The governing scarcity of the information economy is time: the shards of a second, the hours in a day, the years in a life, the latency of memory, the delay in aluminum wires, the time to market, the time to metastasis, the time to retirement.

Everything exists in limited quantity - especially happiness.

It used to hurt me in the past years to hear people say they want to leave India. But with the experience of past few months, I can say that we have removed that gloom from the minds of the people.

I like to eat sweets. When I go to a restaurant, I'll read the dessert menu before I even look at the entrees.

There are still some places I'd love to visit - Africa, China, Brazil, India. I want to travel the world and experience other cultures and peoples.

The more necessary a thing is for living beings, the more easily it is found and the cheaper it is; the less necessary it is, the rarer and dearer it is.

Jewish comedians do the best Jewish jokes, and anyone else doing that, they don't have a right to, because they're not coming from that experience. I know that's a slightly heightened example, but it's the same thing. We're bumpkins, so we can make bumpkin jokes.

Candy within reach and then I have to go on a diet.

This could be our revolution: to love what is plentiful as much as what's scarce.

The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.

Prices impose the most effective kind of rationing - self-rationing. Why is rationing necessary? Because what everybody wants always adds up to more than there is. . .Resources are limited but desires are not. That is the basic and defining problem of economics.

The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and who has to wait.

I don't like lollipops.

Too much is the same as not enough.

Learning from experience and learning from education, both are important. Your education & values decide how you learn from your experiences.

there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.

Wouldst thou multiply thy riches? diminish them wisely; or wouldst thou make thy estate entire? divide it charitably. Seeds that are scattered increase; but, hoarded up, they perish.

It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.

Those who have much are often greedy. Those who have little always share.

A poor woman from Manchester, on being taken to the seaside, is said to have expressed her delight on seeing for the first time something of which there was enough for everybody.