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.

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.

I only really woke up in India. It was my first experience of plenty, strangely enough, because everything in England was rationed. I loved sweets, but you couldn't get them; then there was this marvelous mitthai - I went crazy.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Quotes