Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“I was never interested in film. Never. I never even thought of it. I wasn't even a film buff, I didn't see many films ever.”

“One doesn't choose to become a writer. One is just born that way.”

“I like characters who are larger-than-life, whether life-loving women or the artist or guru who grabs everything. But I don't live among people like that.”

“The older books were quite light-hearted. But I think most of my novels do end on a deep note of pessimism. Shadows seem to be closing in. The final conclusion isn't that life is wonderful and everything is bright and cheery and in the garden.”

“I am a central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis. I am irritable and have weak nerves.”

“Perhaps I'm just fickle by nature and get tired of countries the way other women do of husbands or lovers.”

“England gave me a language and literature, the basis of what I am as a writer, but when I started writing more directly about my own experience, it wasn't England so much as what went before.”

“England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others... I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens... I adopted them passionately.”

“Everyone is so estranged; no one is rooted. That's what I like to write about more than anything else. Everything being so mixed up. Racially mixed up, people moving from place to place, everything shifting.”

“Film, for me, is in two stages. One is when I write the script more or less on my own - that's the nice bit. And then comes for me the unpleasant bit when they all go off, 100 people - actors and camera people and film and sound - and I stay away. When they go into the editing room, I come in again, and that's the bit I like.”