Anita Desai Quotes

• Do you know anyone who would—secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self—really prefer to return to childhood?

  Anita Desai

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• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  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.

  Anita Desai

• 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

• 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

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

  Anita Desai

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

  Anita Desai

• 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

Anita Desai (12)

Birth:	24th June, 1937
Nationality:	Indian
Profession:	Novelist, Professor, Writer

About

Anita Mazumdar Desai was born in Mussoorie, India. She is 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. She was a student at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi and received her B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the Miranda House of the University of Delhi. Desai published her first novel, Cry The Peacock, in 1963. She considers Clear Light of Day her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and also in the same neighbourhood in which she grew up. In 1984 she published In Custody – about an Urdu poet in his declining days – which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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Today's Anniversary - 29th March

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