Anita Desai Quotes

#1. Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.

Anita Desai

#2. The room rang with her voice, then with silence. In the shaded darkness, silence had the quality of a looming dragon. It seemed to roar and the roar to reverberate, to dominate. To escape from it would require a burst of recklessness, even cruelty.

Anita Desai

#3. Reality is merely one-tenth visible section of the iceberg that one sees above the surface of the ocean - art remaining nine-tenths of it that lies below the surface. That is why it is more near Truth than Reality itself. Art does not merely reflect Reality - it enlarges it.

Anita Desai

#4. Quick, nervy and jumpy -yet to the children she was as constant as a staff, a tree that can be counted on not to pull up its root and shift in the night. She was the tree that grew in the centre of their lives and in whose shade they lived.

Anita Desai

#5. Do you know anyone who would - secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self - really prefer to return to childhood?

Anita Desai

#6. Ever since I could first write I have been doing so. When I was taught how to write and read at school, I made up my mind that this was what I love to do best and this was the world I was going to occupy.

Anita Desai

#7. The moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being.

Anita Desai

#8. Many characters in the novel are representative of types that exist in India. He represents the caste system in India with an air of superiority, the caste system in India and the people thinking that western things are better.

Anita Desai

#9. The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.

Anita Desai

#10. Greenness hangs, drips and sways from every branch and twig and frond in the surging luxuriance of July.

Anita Desai

#11. The wheel turns and turns and turns: it never stops and stands still.

Anita Desai

#12. When I am writing, I focus one hundred percent on my writing. Then, by the time I'm half way through the book, I'm already thinking about the ending.

Anita Desai

#13. My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly.

Anita Desai

#14. India is a curious place that still preserves the past, religions, and its history. No matter how modern India becomes, it is still very much an old country.

Anita Desai

#15. Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed.

Anita Desai

#16. What a sense of possession, of confidence, it gave one to have pockets, to shove one's fists into them, as if in simply owning pockets one owned riches, owned independence.

Anita Desai

#17. Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.

Anita Desai

#18. When I was very young, I used to share much of what I wrote with my family, but as I got older and more self-conscious, it became a much more private process.

Anita Desai

#19. They never looked at anyone else, only at each other, with an expression that halted me. It was tender, loving, yes, but in an inhuman way, so intense. Divine, I felt. Or insane.

Anita Desai

#20. I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth.

Anita Desai

#21. Isn't it strange how life won't flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood?

Anita Desai

#22. I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.

Anita Desai

#23. People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way.

Anita Desai