Amitava Kumar Quotes

Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it well or badly. And merely because you've done it well once doesn't mean you can do it well again.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Call me the author.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

Writing is something I want to explore. If I were to do it, I would want it to be not a book made by a YouTuber; I would really want to respect that craft of literature and just be an author.

I can't remember a time when I didn't write or make up stories, because it seemed to come with reading.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.

As an author, I've never forgotten how to daydream.

To some extent, all authors are a little schizophrenic. We lead most of our lives in solitary confinement, living and breathing the books that we're writing.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.

I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.

Many people have told me that my books read like novels. Perhaps this is because, when I write, I feel I am really there, so strong is my feeling for my subject. On occasion, I have been so moved by the events I have been describing that I have felt like crying.

When I write, I imagine places more than people.

There are millions of people who think that romance isn't real writing. But the only person who can make you real, make your books real, is you.

I write my books never thinking of an actor.

Being a writer is great because you get to come up with stuff.

To some degree, I consider myself a writer, and so I have a strong relationship with literature.

A writer is what I am.