Anita Desai
Anita Desai
Anita Mazumdar Desaiis an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times; she received a Sahitya Academy Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Academy, India's National Academy of Letters; she won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth24 June 1937
character trying stories
I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.
writing style trying
My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly.
focus half percent thinking time
When I am writing, I focus 100 percent on my writing. Then, by the time I'm half way through the book, I'm already thinking about the ending.
motivational disappointment book
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.
moon garden risk
...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.
wheels turns stills
The wheel turns and turns and turns: it never stops and stands still.
country past modern-india
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.
romance fantasy telling-the-truth
I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth.
believe book past
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.
writing thinking people
People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way.
book writing thinking
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.
self my-family conscious
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.
independence fists riches
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.
school writing mind
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.