Ashwin Sanghi

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.

Mythology is a set of primitive lies that people rarely believe. This is rather different from history, which is a set of lies that people actually believe.

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

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.

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.

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.

I don't want to be remembered as a writer. I would rather be remembered as a storyteller.

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.

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

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

I love fiction that sounds like fact. As a matter of fact, I also like fact that sounds like fiction.

If there is one city apart from Mumbai where I would love to settle down, it has to be Chennai.