Quotes About Anita Desai

#1. 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

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

Anita Desai

#3. Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking.

Rumi

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

Anita Desai

#5. Sometimes I wish I had never met you, because then I could go to sleep at night not knowing there was someone like you out there.

Gus Van Sant

#6. 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

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

Anita Desai

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Anita Desai

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. Teenagers are like atoms when they're moving at hundreds of miles an hour and bouncing off each other. Everybody's got such a crazy hormonal drive and reacting to each other differently and getting upset over little things. High school puts all these potential explosions in one place.

Anton Yelchin

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Anita Desai

#18. Singaporeans seemed generally quite loathe to discuss these more intimate policies of government with a curious foreign visitor who was more than twice as tall as the average human, and who sweated slowly but continuously, like and aged cheese.

William Gibson

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

Anita Desai

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. There are three things that people pick up on the instant they walk into your home on Thanksgiving. They will be able to feel the human energy. They'll smell the food. And they will see, instantly, the table.

Danny Meyer

#23. 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

#24. 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

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

Anita Desai

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. Parliament must not be told a direct untruth, but it's quite possible to allow them to mislead themselves.

Norman Tebbit

#29. 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