Amitava Kumar Quotes

When I write a story, I have no idea what I'm doing. All I know is that I want to share something with my readers. The whole idea of writing is this place where you lose control, where you're irresponsible - it's a very liberating place.

I have so many themes I want to explore, so many questions I'd like to raise and develop, and hopefully, I'll get to do just that.

I love how people in this business push themselves to know themselves, the world, and their creativity better.

The part of the process that's exciting to me is feeling like I'm in a place I've never been before, in every way. Without that, I don't know if I'd be a writer.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

An artist's job is to surprise himself. Use all means possible.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

As a creative person, you need to sort of spread your wings and try different things out because each one really does inform the other.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

One of the most important reasons for living is to do something - live outside of yourself and put together an idea, an idea that you want to explore and then complete... Awaken your creative sensitivities!

The more I see and know about life, the more ideas I have and the more I want to make art.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

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.

I have four or five ideas that just keep floating around and I want to kind of just let one - like a beautiful butterfly, let it land somewhere.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

I get so much inspiration from my travels, but I also started an exercise where I write down so many words every week. Then I begin crossing them off. We create a grid of words and also images, but words for me are more ample because you can interpret them your own way.

The stage sharpened my creative instrument and encouraged me to go deeper and try new things.

When I try to write I try to write something different every time. That's the challenge.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

The key thing is that you start every film from sort of a blank page, almost like you discover it like a child discovers a new world.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.