Amitava Kumar Quotes

I'm an escapist kind of writer.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

There are probably writers who are much more visual than I am and some who are less. I like to think of myself as a happy medium.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else.

I like it when I can hear directly from the writer: what they're seeing, what they're envisioning, and what their intention is.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

It wasn't until I was in my teens that I started admiring writers as inspirations for my own work, and my earliest influences there were Stephen King, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Richard Adams.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

You become a great writer by writing.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I write novels and other things.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

I tend to describe recurring themes as being part of a writer's DNA - something so deeply embedded in us that even we don't notice it until we've written three or four books.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

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.

One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.

I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play.