Famous quotes by Famous people

” Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can’t ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don’t give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you’re living in. “

” I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel – till I am – nothing. As it happens, I like it that way. “

” I only really woke up in India. It was my first experience of plenty, strangely enough, because everything in England was rationed. I loved sweets, but you couldn’t get them, then there was this marvelous mitthai – I went crazy. “

” All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English, now I write as if I were American. You take other people’s backgrounds and characters, Keats called it negative capability. “

” Film is not like a book, it’s not a writer’s baby at all. So many people have put in their talent, by that time that you feel grateful for what they’ve done, you don’t feel possessive about it in any way. “

” First, I was so dazzled and besotted by India. People said the poverty was biblical, and I’m afraid that was my attitude, too. It’s terribly easy to get used to someone else’s poverty if you’re living a middle-class life in it. But after a while, I saw it wasn’t possible to accept it, and I also didn’t want to. “

” It’s technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what’s really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way. “

” I always find the first thing that really bothers me when I start a screenplay is, I have to find a different form. You can’t follow the form of the novel. It’s a different thing completely. It’s impossible. You just somehow have to find a structure for the whole thing. You have to crack that. “