Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

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.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Perhaps I’m just fickle by nature and get tired of countries the way other women do of husbands or lovers.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

England gave me a language and literature, the basis of what I am as a writer, but when I started writing more directly about my own experience, it wasn’t England so much as what went before.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

I am a central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis. I am irritable and have weak nerves.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Quotes

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