Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes

'The Hobbit' was one of the first biggish books I ever read. I remember vividly the 'riddles in the dark' passage, and it meant a lot to me to finally get to play it after all these years.

'The Long Goodbye' is one book I like to read over and over again, and it was an enormous inspiration for 'All The Wrong Questions'.

'Black Beauty,' by Anna Sewell, remains a star-dusted memory because my mom read it aloud to my sister and me at night for months. I was no more than 7.

The first time I remember really being excited about a book was 'The Count of Monte Cristo.'

When I was about 12 or 13, my father gave me 'The Little Prince.' He was making sure that I knew it was a special book. I'd seen the name of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, but to me it seemed a very French name, and I was not excited about him as a person.

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

When I was a teenager, the number one book I was most obsessed with was 'Gone with the Wind.'

When I was a kid, I loved 'Little Women.'

When I was a young child and before he had left us for the U.S., my father would give me Mark Twain novels. In the characters, the weather and the context, my father must have seen many parallels to his own youth in the Caribbean in the 1930s and 40s.

Apparently, when I was really little, I watched the film version of 'The Secret Garden' and thought it was, like, the best thing ever.

On the day long after childhood when I suddenly heard of his death, the sky grew dark above my head. I was walking on a Southern highway, and a friend driving in a pony carriage passed me, stopped and said, "Have you heard that Charles Dickens is dead?" It was as if I had been robbed of one of my dearest friends.

I was a Nancy Drew girl. Also Grimms' fairy tales.

I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.

I read 'The Hobbit' only when I was an adult. I had a lot of friends, teenagers, who discovered reading through 'The Hobbit,' but it wasn't something that I discovered until later in life.

It was really in the Golden Age, between the two world wars, when the pure detective story - of which the locked room mystery is really the ultimate form - became popular.

When I was in college, there were dollar movie nights. I went to see 'The Long Goodbye,' which was based on one of Chandler's books but was contemporary and set in Los Angeles in 1973. I loved the movie, which motivated me to read the book.

I'm a big reader, so when I was in 'Pride and Prejudice,' or, like, in Poirots and Marples, those are all books that I loved, and so it was really exciting for me to inhabit characters from literature that I knew and recognized.

I remember 'Battlestar Galactica' shot at the college that my dad taught at. I remember trying on a Cylon helmet. I think I was 6 or 7 years old.

I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there.

I never saw 'Home Alone.'

I was probably the only 10-year-old who adored Sandy Dennis.

I can still remember the first time I heard a Beatles song. It was the fall of 1964, my second year in an American school after my family moved back from overseas, and I was standing on the corner of 64th street and First Avenue with my friend Larry Campbell.

When I was twelve, I fell in love with Candice Bergen.

I probably saw 'Jaws' when I was 10.

When I was little, my parents took me to the San Diego Zoo. I was about 5 years old, and I got a tour of the zoo that hardly anybody else has ever had.