Nithya Menen Quotes

I'm a big believer that the script is your bible.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

My novels are all ideas.

A novel, of course, is a fully self-contained work of art. You pick it up off the shelf, open it, and there it is - a whole universe waiting for you to enter. A screenplay is just a blueprint for making a movie. Until the movie is actually filmed, the script really means nothing.

The multilevel, the conscious and the unconscious, is natural when I write scripts, when I come up with ideas and stories.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

Jerry picked up the technique of visualizing the story as a movie scenario; and whenever he gave me a script, I would see it as a screenplay. That was the technique that Jerry used, and I just picked it up.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

The fact is fiction is always a representation of life, sometimes the lives of famous people.

If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.

Your instincts for what's dramatic are the same whether you're working on a drawing or on a script.

I recommend to any of you, that's always a good way to make a film: use the interesting bits.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

I keep writing stories that I might want to bring to life one day.

This is what I think is fun about fiction - you get to use as much history as you want as scaffolding and then go beyond it and change it and mutate it.

The secret of making movies is having the strongest possible script.

Every film starts with the script.

Usually, I think, every film I've made has been a book, and I've always read it.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

If I can't find real situations that interest me in real life, then I'll go and write them in play form.