Ashwin Sanghi Quotes

I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read.

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

I like reading a lot. Jeffrey Archer and Robert Ludlum are my favourite authors. I love making realistic cinema, so I read non-fiction more.

What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it's a far harder form.

In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

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

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.

When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.