Karan Mahajan Quotes

When you're actually inside the experience of writing something, in some ways, you're just writing. Ultimately, you fall in love with the characters, and you get excited about the story, and you're sitting there in your sweatpants or pajamas, and you do get a little lost in it.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

When I am so intensely involved with writing my books, I don't like to reread them. I feel like that story is done.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else.

I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

I've been writing fiction probably since I was about 6 years old, so it's something that is second nature to me now. I just sit down and start writing. I don't sit down and start writing and it comes out perfectly - it's a process.

Fans always say they laughed and they cried while reading my books. And I tell them that I laughed and cried while writing them.

Writing 'when you find me,' it really exposed me to a way of putting together a story I hadn't thought of.

It's a trifle hard to surprise yourself with a story you've written.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

My novels are all ideas.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience.