Ashwin Sanghi Quotes

My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done.

I love writing thrillers.

I'd be lying if I said that any part of writing is easy for me, but I have always found that setting comes more naturally to me than, say, writing action scenes.

I started my career as an actor, then morphed into a playwright who accidentally became a novelist with my first book 'Fall On Your Knees.'

To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form.

Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn't good enough!

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

Down the road a bit, I would like to write a couple of stand-alone adult novels, especially in the horror genre. I've got lots of things up my sleeve.

Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.

When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

If I had stayed purely a horror writer or thriller writer, I might have more of a presence in those particular genres, and I'd certainly have more individual titles to market, since it's much easier to write pure genre fiction than it is to create something different.

Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

I think, for me, there's The Book I Should Write and The Book I Wanted to Write - and they weren't the same book. The Book I Should Write should be realistic, since I studied English Lit. It should be cultural. It should reflect where I am today. The Book I Wanted to Write would probably include flying women, magic, and all of that.

I wrote four novels under the name Amy Silver. The first one was commissioned, and I was given basically the whole plot and the characters. They told me what to do, and I went straight away and did it. After that, I continued, and I was coming up with more my own ideas, although they did steer me.

I actually enjoy writing longer books because you have even more to get your storytelling teeth into.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.