Rajkumar Hirani Quotes

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

When I read a book, I like to be surprised. I don't want to read the same genre formula that I've read a hundred times before.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

I try not to repeat a story. I try not to repeat an emotion. I want it to be all sort of new for the viewers and to challenge myself as a writer, so there's always pressure. What else can you come up with?

The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.

There's no game plan when it comes to thinking up new characters; inspiration can come from anything - from a wig I've seen to an expression I've heard someone use.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

I prefer writing originals.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.

One day I had an idea for a movie. Everything came after that.

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.

All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different.

I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.

I get ideas for my books from people I know and what happens to them, from places I've been and what happens to me, and from things I read.

When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.