Words matter. These are the best Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Perhaps I’m just fickle by nature and get tired of countries the way other women do of husbands or lovers.
I am a central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis. I am irritable and have weak nerves.
The misfortune to be born when I was, where I was. That was a piece of bad luck.
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.
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.
It’s technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what’s really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.
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.
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.
I always find the first thing that really bothers me when I start a screenplay is, I have to find a different form. You can’t follow the form of the novel. It’s a different thing completely. It’s impossible. You just somehow have to find a structure for the whole thing. You have to crack that.
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.
India was a sensation. It was remarkable to see all those parrots flying about, the brilliant foliage and the brilliant sky. It was a tremendous pageant. I never noticed the poverty.
