Arundhati Roy Quotes

If I couldn't get published tomorrow I'd still be writing. It's something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable.

I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

I write my songs because I've lived them.

I'm a firm believer in putting your experiences in your writing, of bleeding into the page.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever - I rap about it.

If there's something you want to say or talk about, then that's what rap is all about - talking about your own experience.

Truly great performers reveal not only their characters but bring everything they know about the world with them. It's not just what's in the script but the story of everything you've done and of who you are. If you're Chaplin, you're the immigrant. No matter what he's doing, he's always the little guy trying to make his place in the world.

I am a storyteller and a researcher, and I'm sorry the world has a hard time straddling the tension of those two things, but that's who I am.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.

I try not to write songs. I would rather emote them, and I found myself going back to my room every night while on my trip, just pouring out new songs and new stories about what I was seeing, what I was feeling.

Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.

A lot of my writing is basically about observation, and things that I've seen, either through personal experiences or the experiences of people around me, or society at large.

I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?

I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.

If you are disappearing from yourself, but you're still writing, then there is a kind of activity of thinking going on, which in my world is similar to what's going on in music.

If I can get it down on paper without puking all over the word processor, then as far as I'm concerned, it's fit to see the light of day.

I'm not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do, no mystique.

The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.

Every work coming from the creator is about getting the demons out, and each character in those stories had a different personal crisis to get through.

All of that loneliness and longing in my heart got transferred into the book Because of Winn-Dixie, I guess.

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.