Anita Desai

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

“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”

“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.”

“At first she mistook them for sheets of pink crepe paper that someone had crumpled and carelessly flung down the hillside, perhaps after another astonishing party at the club. A moment later she remembered her great-grandmother's words and saw that they were hosts of wild pink zephyranthes that had come up in the night after the first fall of rain.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Only their efforts to make him talk failed. he would say one word at a time, if pressed, but seemed happier not to and could not be made to repeat a whole line. Gradually, as his family learnt how to anticipate his few needs and how to respond, they ceased to notice his silence -his manner of communication seemed full and rich enough to them: he no more needed to converse than Aunt Mira's cat did.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Her eyes opened at this sight against her will and she looked around the room almost in fear. But it was dark and shadowy, shaded by the bamboo screen at the door, the damp rush mats at the windows, the old heavy curtains and the spotted, peeling walls, and in their shade she saw how she loved him, loved Raja and Tara and all of them who had lived in this house with her. There could be no love more deep and full and wide than this one, she knew. No other love had started so far back in time and had had so much time in which to grow and spread. They were really all parts of her, inseparable, so many aspects of her as she was of them, so that the anger or the disappointment she felt in them was only the anger and disappointment she felt at herself. Whatever hurt they felt, she felt. Whatever diminished them, diminished her. What attacked them, attacked her. Nor was there anyone else on earth whom she was willing to forgive more readily or completely, or defend more instinctively and instantly. She could hardly believe, at that moment, that she would Iive on after they did or they would continue after she had ended. If such an unimaginable phenomenon could take place, then surely they would remain flawed, damaged for life. The wholeness of the pattern, its perfection, would be gone.She lay absolutely still, almost ceasing to breathe, afraid to diminish by even a breath the wholeness of that love.”

“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.”