Arundhati Roy Quotes

An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

I pointedly avoid doing sequels, since for the most part I find that a sequel rarely stands up to the original.

I fear becoming formulaic. Some of my books are.

For a while, when I got out of college, I tried to write fiction. I'd grown up more around novelists, and my initial attraction was to write fiction. But I was much less suited for it. I always struggled to figure out what people were saying or doing in a particular moment.

There's nothing more painful than writing.

Knowing what you're up against is part of the strength of writing something that is even, I guess, considered halfway original, knowing what's out there to begin with.

In fine, nothing is said now that has not been said before.

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.

If you write an original, it's like you went in and dug a well, and you hit oil. But an adaptation, it's like the oil well's on fire, and they bring you in to put the fire out and get it working again - or something like that.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.

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.

I question every word; I write 'the' and immediately feel scorn. It's such an ordinary word - everybody uses it - why can't I come up with something original? In the sunlight, every single word seems hackneyed.

I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer.

There are a lot of authors in the world, so it's difficult to find a unique niche to present your take on things. That is always a challenge for any author.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

I don't want to repeat myself.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

The reason is that for many years I have avoided reading anything whatsoever that approaches my own line of country, out of a somewhat fanatical desire to avoid the risk of unconscious imitation.

One of the things that I've been trying to do with my characters, one of the things that does lead to me turning things down, is I don't really want to repeat myself.

The danger for any artist whose work is both recognizable and critically acclaimed is complacent repetition - the temptation to churn out easily identifiable, eagerly welcomed, and readily salable designs.

Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that.

I'm constantly battling writer's block; it usually takes me two hours to write anything.