Top 60 Ashwin Sanghi Quotes

My attention span is very limited, and I watch just one or two movies a year.

Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.

The Egyptians saw the sun and called him Ra, the Sun God. He rode across the sky in his chariot until it was time to sleep. Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise, and poor Ra lost his divinity.

After preliminary research, I zero in on an idea, and then I spend at least four months exploring the topic and in plot-building. I jot down every single detail of the plot as bullet points per chapter, and only when the skeleton is complete do I start writing.

Admiration from my readers inspire me, and the only ‘formula’ I believe in towards making a good writer is: ‘to thine own self be true!’

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.

When working on a period, it is the finer details that evoke imagery that helps in cinematic adaptations.

I was always taught that book keeping was more relevant than book reading. The only thing worth reading was meant to be a balance sheet.

A book and a movie are different animals. You need a cinematic perspective to be involved in the motion pictures. And this is something I lack.

While growing up, I always had to depend on foreign authors for page-turners. I think of myself as a commercial writer, and my job is simple to entertain you.

My life is ruled by four W’s: my writing, my work, my wife, and my whisky. Not necessarily in that order.

At thirty-five, having spent over twenty years running varied businesses for my family, I decided to sit down and write my first novel. I had never written anything longer than a couple of pages till then and was foolishly attempting to write a hundred-thousand words.

A western audience might not appreciate ‘Chanakya’s Chant’ because of its dependence on history and ancient statecraft. My book is a modern-day thriller that draws on a bedrock of history. My primary object is to entertain, not educate.

Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.

I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing, I wanted to keep my literary identity separate.

Once upon a time, I was a workaholic clocking more than 80 hours per week. That changed after I began to write. I now work only around 35 hours per week. I do not work on weekends because these are the days that I use for research as well as for my writing.

I was learning book-keeping at the age of 12, but it never stopped me from pursuing literature. Over the years, I grew to love the written word.

I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary, so I don’t see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved.

Our country has the oldest tradition of storytelling, and this was much before writing stories even became a norm.

I like to joke that I probably hold the world record for rejection letters. Yes, the truth is that I was fed up of being rejected repeatedly, and self-publication was an act of defiance at traditional publishing. But life works in strange ways.

My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability to lie with a straight face as a child.

I was passionate about reading from an early age, and I would always be carrying a different book each week.

I must admit that i am fascinated by the glories of ancient India. But when will the purveyors of Indian culture realise that not everything about our past was glorious?

Though it is very easy to do valuations, eyeballs and brand prominence surveys, you should never allow any of them to influence the balance sheet.

I feel luck plays a vey crucial role in determining the success of the book. Marketing a book is also very important. You need to try all tricks in the trade.

Take the first A out of Abraham and put it at the end. You get Brahama. There’s the ancient connection right there.

What is divine? It is simply that which man has not been able to understand. Once you do, it loses its divinity.

Write when drunk. Edit when sober. Marketing is the hangover.

I believe that every writer evolves with every successive novel. I view myself as work-in-progress.

When I wrote ‘The Rozabal Line,’ I had no preconceived notions of what a commercial bestseller should be. I have always viewed ‘The Rozabal Line’ as my first love and probably my best work. The fact, however, is that it is my least read work.

That freedom of writing you don’t get in other formats, I’d rather leave it to someone else to deal with the headache of drafting my book into a screenplay.

We can’t deny that films have a bigger reach. After the popularity of the ‘Slumdog Millionaire,’ a lot of people started reading Vikas Swarup’s ‘Q & A’. From a business sense, films are a good tool to increase the number of readers.

It is no secret that I have read ‘The Da Vinci Code’ several times. I genuinely believe that ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and ‘Angels And Demons’ are, by far, Brown’s best works.

Mythology is like a game of Chinese Whispers. What goes in at one end of the human circle is rarely what emerges at the other end.

I have always been a bit of an introvert. In fact, my dad used to force me to meet people so that my interpersonal skills improve. As an individual, I was happiest when left alone.

Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, despite living through the 1917 February Revolution, forced exile amidst the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, the two World Wars and quite a lot of controversy, was an author who never gave up.

A myth is a lie that conceals or reveals a truth. But if it reveals even a strand of history or truth, that’s what gets my adrenaline going.

Mythology is a set of primitive lies that people rarely believe. This is rather different from history, which is a set of lies that people actually believe.

The relationship between critic and writer is similar to the one between the pigeon and the statue.

J. K. Rowling’s first ‘Harry Potter’ manuscript was rejected 12 times. Stephen King’s ‘Carrie’ was rejected 30 times. ‘Gone With The Wind’ was rejected 38 times. I was immensely proud to have beaten them all.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, ‘You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been’. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

Physicists explain creation by telling us that the universe began with the Big Bang, an intense energy singularity that continued expanding. But who created the singularity?

There is one person who can help solve ‘writer’s block’. His name is Mr. Johnnie Walker.

Everyone talks about moderation. How about some moderation in moderation?

It is not history, theology or mythology that interest me. It is the fact that history, theology or mythology could have alternative interpretations or explanations. I try to connect the dots between the past and the present.

I don’t start with the characters. I start with the series of events that will provide the conflict and how it can be resolved. Characters are incidental.

There is a method to the madness of James Patterson’s success. Co-writing with him is a terrific learning experience, particularly in the art of crafting a perfect thriller. The collaboration also gives me an opportunity to access a wider global audience.

Till the time I found a creative outlet, I was trying to be extra creative at business, which would always put me in a situation of conflict with other stakeholders. The moment I started writing, my creative impulses were finally channelised.

Combine two words, Myth and History. What do you get? Mystery.

Did God create man, or did man create God? Either way, the decision needs to be reviewed.

I work in a business environment forty hours a week, and writing is what I do to unwind. It allows me to transport myself to a happy place where I can indulge my hopes, beliefs, aspirations and fantasies. It also allows me to live and breathe a topic for eighteen months while I’m researching and writing.

It is easy to club people together, but there are bound to be influences of authors you’ve read. I grew up reading fast paced authors such as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer, but to say I’m one of them isn’t true; my style is intrinsically my own.

Mythology does not interest me. Nor does history. But the possible overlap between history and mythology excites me immensely.

If there is one city apart from Mumbai where I would love to settle down, it has to be Chennai.

If I use the word ‘khichdi’ in my novel, I don’t have to get into the trouble of explaining that it is a dish of rice and lentils. My Indian readers know it.