Top 119 Quotes & Sayings by Ashwin Sanghi

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.

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.

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.

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.

Omniscient, omnipotent, omnivorous and omnipresent all begin with Om.

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

The publishing scene in India is evolving rapidly, and the key challenge is to keep reinventing oneself so that one does not become formulaic. Sometimes it is safer to deal with the consequences of failure than the fruits of success. Remaining on one's toes is critical, and often one finds that success makes one complacent.

'Rozabal' was theological while 'Chanakya' is political. Unlike 'Rozabal,' which was about research, the aim of 'Chanakya' is plot, plot, plot, which carries the character. The common DNA, of course, is history.

What I have found is that, in a family business structure, sometimes what is needed is a sense of discipline rather than creativity. You have to take everyone's ideas and make it work. When you are dealing with money, there is a limitation on how creative you can be.

In the Sanghi family, there is no one who has undertaken intellectual pursuits.

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.

Humankind would improve if we concentrated less on being human and more on being kind.

I want my writing to reach people. I don't write for a market. I write from my heart, something that appeals to me. The marketing, segmenting etc., can be done by your publisher, not you.

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.

Unlike a typical professional, I can't quit my job to become a full-time author; I don't have that luxury. For me, writing is therapy; if I choose to write full-time, it might start feeling like work.

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

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

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.

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.

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 reality of the writer's world is that you set yourself up for future disappointment with every success that you deliver because you end up raising your audience's expectations.

Conspiracies fascinate me. When I visited the Rozabal shrine in Srinagar before writing my first book, I remember thinking that the person enshrined there was no ordinary mortal. History is rife with mysteries, and that visit ignited a fire to unveil some of them.

The decision to use a pen name was nothing more than a desire to compartmentalise my life. However, I had not thought about an appropriate pseudonym, and since there's an abundance of anagrams in the novel, the idea struck me: why not use an anagram of my name? Hence, Shawn Haigins.

Writing helps me create a different world that I can escape to.

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

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

Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.

In Kolkata is a temple where the deity worshipped is Amitabh Bachchan. The daily aarti is performed to the chanting of the Amitabh Chaleesa. And people still ask, 'Could our mythological heroes be based on actual people who once lived?'

Thrills are much more about anticipation than action. An unfired bullet is more dangerous than one that has already met its target.

There are three things I look for in a story - it has to be a thriller; I cannot see myself writing literary fiction or a saga! There has to be a historical connection; otherwise, the adrenalin will not flow. And I will try to bridge the gap between 'Rozabal' and 'Chanakya'.

While I can't walk on water, I can certainly wobble on whisky.

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

My self-publishing adventure led to my work being picked up by a traditional publisher and eventually hitting the bestseller lists. That led to two more bestselling novels.

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.

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.

Initial work is on period research where the historical markers are absolutely non-negotiable. Once that is established, a writer can take creative liberties in terms of chronology to suit the story.

Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The story - and hence the extensive research that goes into each one of my books - is much more important than the words that I use to narrate it.

I would imagine that anyone picking up a book written by me would expect a fast-paced story that requires minimal effort to turn the pages. The reader would also be looking for some out-of-the-ordinary revelations along the way. At the end of the day, I'm a writer who simply loves revealing stuff that is out-of-the-ordinary.

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.

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.

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

What I would not like is to be ignored. I write from the heart. I don't write for me. I write for my readers.

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

The average human attention span was 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013. A drop of 33%. The scary part is that the attention span of a goldfish was 9 seconds, almost 13% more than us humans. That's why it's getting tougher by the day to get people to turn the page. Maybe we writers ought to try writing for goldfish!

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

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?

I've always been fascinated by books. When I was young, my grandfather used to hand out a book - which would be anything from a biography to a classic - to me every week and ask me to write a piece on what I thought about it. On the other hand, my mother used to love reading thrillers and bestsellers.

After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.

I want to be remembered as a storyteller more than someone who had something meaningful to say.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am a businessman at the end of the day. I have grown up with Excel sheets. I start out writing my novel with spreadsheets and the milestones in each chapter highlighted.

There has to be a protagonist who has to overcome challenges, and there will be a race to finish.

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.

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.