Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels.

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.

It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.

I am a novelist through and through.

I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.

If getting a contract was relatively straightforward, writing fiction was far harder than I could have imagined, and there were moments during the long and torturous edit process when it seemed that 'Zulu Hart,' the first of the trilogy, would never be fit for public consumption.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

I'm writing exactly the kinds of books I like to write. And they're the kinds of books I like to read. They're popular commercial fiction. That's what they are.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

I do think novels are overlooked. I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called 'The End of the Story,' not to blow my own horn.

I think many people would say that writers like Stephen King have hypergraphia.

Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.