Rohinton Mistry Quotes

Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Everything is personal - the poems and the crime novels. I have never been involved in any murders, but there are strong autobiographical elements in each.

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

I do write a lot from personal experience, but I also embellish a bit.

There are autobiographical elements to the albums, and when I write, I always reference my own life as well as other things, so I'm just like any novelist or any fiction writer who tells stories.

I don't write autobiographically.

So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

History releases me from my own experience and jogs my fictional imagination.

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.

Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

Stories develop from things I read and also from my own experiences and experiences of people I know.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

Sometimes, I get ideas from dreams. Often, my stories are based on adventures that I, or my friends, have actually lived.