Aravind Adiga Quotes

I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

Fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject

I don't try to be satirical. I just try to get what's in my head on the page. And that part is hard for me to do. It takes a long, long time to make it poetic, somewhat essayistic.

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.

There's a perception that good writing is writing which runs smoothly. But smooth-running prose can work against what you're trying to express in a novel.

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.

Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue... I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

The advice I continually give to young writers is this, "Learn to paint pictures with words." Not just once upon a time, but ... In the long secret dust of ages, beneath a blue forgotten sky, where trade winds caress the sun bleached shores of unknown realms ... See, as much as there are words in poetry, there is a poetry in words. Use it, stay faithful to the path you have set your heart upon and follow it.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

I write novels and other things.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

I think, in reading a few sentences of text, you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers but in lyricists as well.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

I really came to literature through poetry.

Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.