Amitava Kumar Quotes

I read a quote to the effect that we are always writing about ourselves no matter what we're doing. That may be so.

The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.

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.

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.

I write from the voice in my head.

Look, anything any writer writes is going to be on some level autobiographical. Part of the funny/sad thing is that you don't always know how autobiographical you're being.

Our own lives always influence the way we write.

I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.

When I lead essay workshops, I ask students to come up with at least five topics, which they'll narrow down to one. The winning idea should be the story the student is most excited to tell because it honestly reflects his or her best self.

I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.

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

Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all just gone out the door.

I write autobiographically, although I apply liberal amounts of poetic license.

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

'Dreamsongs' allows me to show the scope of my writing - with personal commentary that puts the works in context and includes some autobiographical details intended to reveal how each piece came to be, what it represents, and how it has formed, or been informed by, my philosophy of writing.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

Actually, that's one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don't want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies.

When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about?'

Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself.

Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

For the most part, there's so much of me in my characters.