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
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.
england experience marvelous strangely woke
I only really woke up in India. It was my first experience of plenty, strangely enough, because everything in England was rationed. I loved sweets, but you couldn't get them; then there was this marvelous mitthai - I went crazy.
among characters people whether women
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.
bothers crack form screenplay somehow structure
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.
certain freedom fuse interested learn
I'm not interested in who am I. I'm interested in what's gone, the disinheritance, what I've been able to become or learn or fuse with or not fuse with. A certain freedom comes... I like it that way.
close felt indians tend terrible
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.
allegiance entirely identified society wherever
Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can't ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don't give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you're living in.
accept afraid attitude easy life living people possible poverty saw terribly
First, I was so dazzled and besotted by India. People said the poverty was biblical, and I'm afraid that was my attitude, too. It's terribly easy to get used to someone else's poverty if you're living a middle-class life in it. But after a while, I saw it wasn't possible to accept it, and I also didn't want to.
convey extremely good meaning somehow sounds
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.