Amitava Kumar Quotes

I write from my life, my experience. I'm selfish that way.

Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

I don't write about my life in my column.

I'm a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there's a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

Everything is personal - the poems and the crime novels. I have never been involved in any murders, but there are strong autobiographical elements in each.

Young writers reasonably say, 'I don't know what to write about,' so writing about yourself is a very literal way to begin.

All my songs come from me because I only seem able to write about myself and my experiences.

When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.

Personal narrative is one of the few things where people don't get caught up in fighting over esoteric rhetoric.

I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works - which are usually, in the end, more creative visions unto themselves than illuminating explanations.

When I write for myself, I think about myself and draw from my own experience.

As autobiographical as say the stuff on 'Rumours' was, I don't think we thought of it as such when we were writing it.

We've always written from personal experiences.

I think it's easier for me to write from experience.

I tend to write from a personal place, and most of the time when I'm writing by myself, it's coming from something I've experienced.

All of my songs were about my firsthand experiences. Pretty much, I've learned how to become my own muse and take situations from my own life and wear them on my sleeve.

I'm Turkish-American; I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. I'm an autobiographical writer in the sense that whether in fiction or nonfiction, the issues and relationships and phenomena and problems I'm most interested in exploring are the ones I've experienced personally.

There are some readers who have never read an essay on taste; and if they take my advice they never will, for they can no more improve their taste by so doing than they could improve their appetite or digestion by studying a cookery-book.

I decided with 'Savage Season' to use a lot of things in my life as the basis.

Writing from life is how I feel most comfortable.

Gore Vidal was a man of immense literary talent, some of which he used well, some of which he wasted.

A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority 'Invisible Man' gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.

I don't write anything that I hadn't experienced or hadn't been through.

I wrote about scenarios that I was going through and then disguised them.