Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes

My struggle over the years has constantly been, it only takes 10 minutes, or an average shower, to come up with a mini-series or two, but it takes a year to draw them. So for me, it's been just trying to find a way to get all these ideas and all these incidents on paper.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

People have asked me a lot, 'What comes first? The pictures or the story? The story or the picture?' It's hard to describe because often they seem to come at the same time. I'm seeing images while I'm thinking of the story.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

I always tell people I write songs, but I'm a writer. It's a difference. I can write songs to music, but I can write a story. I can see ideas spark in me.

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

I'm not like a Sears Catalog of ideas. I don't have that many ideas. I've more or less written them over the years. Usually, I come up with a situation or a character, and it rattles around in my head until the story or the plot emerges.

I have trouble writing if I can't picture how things are going to look.

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.

You are always drawing from your personal life and using your imagination to fill in the blanks.

As a writer, you look for inspiration wherever you can get it.

Writing, when it works, one needs to access whatever it is that creates dreams.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

If a writer stops observing, he is finished.

When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.

At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it-it will haunt you till it's written.