Ashwin Sanghi Quotes

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

Worry is like a rocking chair; it keeps you in motion but gets you nowhere

Character is what you are. Reputation is what people think you are.

The Divine is simply that which science has not yet explained. In effect, God = Infinity - Human Knowledge.

Though it is very easy to do valuations, eyeballs and brand prominence surveys, you should never allow any of them to influence the balance sheet.

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 cant know where youre going if you dont know where youve been. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

We don't need to dumb down our stuff. And it's important to know how far we can push readers.

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

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

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.

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

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-publicatio n was an act of defiance at traditional publishing. But life works in strange ways.

Writing is a intensely personal activity. I can pen down my best thoughts when Im alone. But when one is elevated into the stature of an author, you have to think about your books in terms of their business angle.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Winning an award is a great feeling but winning the Vodafone Crossword Popular Choice Award is particularly exhilarating because it is based upon public voting. I find it a strange quirk of fate that Chanakya's Chant, a political tale, should end up winning an election!

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 everyones ideas and make it work. When you are dealing with money, there is a limitation on how creative you can be.

I want to make sure that my writing grips the reader from the word 'go.'

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.

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.

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

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