Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, CBEwas a German-born British and American Booker prize-winning novelist, short story writer and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. She is perhaps best known for her long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of director James Ivory and the late producer Ismail Merchant...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 May 1927
CountryGermany
book character writing
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 peoples backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
writing preparation trying
I am dissatisfied with everything I have ever written and regard it all only as a preparation for that one work which probably I don't have it in me to write but which I hope I can go on trying for.
book quitting
Westernized Indians don't like my books and I tend not to like westernized Indians - so we're quits.
people india exception
India always changes people, and I have been no exception
luck pieces born
The misfortune to be born when I was, where I was. That was a piece of bad luck.
baby book grateful
Film is not like a book; it's not a writer's baby at all. So many people have put in their talent, by that time that you feel grateful for what they've done, you don't feel possessive about it in any way.
book garden thinking
The older books were quite light-hearted. But I think most of my novels do end on a deep note of pessimism. Shadows seem to be closing in. The final conclusion isn't that life is wonderful and everything is bright and cheery and in the garden.
bit less people script sound stay unpleasant
Film, for me, is in two stages. One is when I write the script more or less on my own - that's the nice bit. And then comes for me the unpleasant bit when they all go off, 100 people - actors and camera people and film and sound - and I stay away. When they go into the editing room, I come in again, and that's the bit I like.
countries fickle husbands nature perhaps women
Perhaps I'm just fickle by nature and get tired of countries the way other women do of husbands or lovers.
central constant deplorable education european tendency
I am a central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis. I am irritable and have weak nerves.
mixed people
Everyone is so estranged; no one is rooted. That's what I like to write about more than anything else. Everything being so mixed up. Racially mixed up, people moving from place to place, everything shifting.
adopted charles england george opened thomas
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.