Literary Birthday – 24 June – Anita Desai

Happy Birthday, Anita Desai, born on 24 June 1937.

Anita Desai Quotes

1. When I was taught how to write and read at school, I made up my mind that this was what I love to do best and this was the world I was going to occupy.
2. Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.
3. Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.
4. Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practise a sport every day to keep their skills honed.
5. I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.
6. Reality is merely one-tenth visible section of the iceberg that one sees above the surface of the ocean – art remaining nine-tenths of it that lies below the surface. That is why it is more near Truth than Reality itself. Art does not merely reflect Reality – it enlarges it.
7. Isn’t it strange how life won’t flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood?

Anita Desai is an Indian novelist who has been short-listed for the Booker Prize three times for her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody, and Fasting, Feasting. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea. Most of her works reflects Desai’s essentially tragic view of life. She taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature. A list of her works can be found here. Her daughter Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize for the novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006).

Source for photograph: Pan Macmillan

by Amanda Patterson
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