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Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Quotes


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Quotes by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Showing 11-20 of 22 Quotes by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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.

~Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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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.

~Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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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.

~Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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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.

~Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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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.

~Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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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.

~Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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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.

~Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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

~Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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I never really had any close friends in India, and I felt a terrible loneliness and isolation for many years. Westernized Indians don't like my books and I tend not to like westernized Indians - so we're quits.

~Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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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.

~Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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Biography

Nationality: German

Type: Novelist

Born: May 7th, 1927

Died: April 3rd, 2013

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