Quotes from Ravi Subramanian

I am not a great fan of serious, heavy writing. I prefer simple, short sentences, light on prose.

After my first book, I figured that since it was successful, I wanted to continue things better.

At times, parents foist their own choices on kids and try to get them to read the classics. But kids have very high filters and don't take to it. At other times, parents simply don't know what books to select for their children and end up giving books that aren't appropriate.

If there is one currency that helped Wikileaks take on the might of the U.S. Government, it was Bitcoins.

There were many times in my initial days as a writer when I had felt the need to talk to someone, to leverage on someone's experience, to learn from someone who had written and published a book.

You don't have to be a criminal to write about fraud!

If evil wins in a Bollywood film, it is bound to flop. A lot of people here want to change society, so they like to read about it being changed. And that means good usually triumphs.

Given my extensive background in foreign banks, writing about them came quite naturally to me. Thankfully, God has been kind to me.

For me, writing is fun. The day I quit my job and take up writing full time, writing will become just another job. A commercial necessity.

There's a market for fiction based on financial services. People wanted me to write stories based on this sector. There's a gap in the market, and I'm trying to fill it.

I am very adventurous with authors, but not very with genres.

While a lot of management development books try to teach you a lesson or give you a scenario of what corporate culture and work practices are about, they're theoretical and written in a sermonizing way. Most people don't get past the first chapter, and they just look nice on the bookshelf.

I will do everything in my power to keep my readers.

After my first book, many of my readers came back to tell me that the female characters I had created were not strong enough. I have consciously rectified that in my next four books. In any case, it's true that women run the world, and men would do better to listen to them!

I believe any fiction writer is inspired by real life.

I had, at a point in time, decided not to write on the corporate world. But if people expect me to set stories in a work environment, then why go away from it?

A thriller needs to hold the interest of the reader from the very beginning. It needs to engage with them, hold them in rapt attention, and prevent them from putting down the book.

In India, we don't read thrillers; we read authors.

My preferred genre of reading is crime thrillers - books by Harlan Coben, Jo Nesbo, David Baldacci, James Patterson, Ashwin Sanghi and a few others - and I write crime thrillers.

With thrillers, I tend to concentrate on the research and pace more than the characters.

Writing with a film in mind - writing like a screenplay - is a sureshot recipe for disaster.

Writing in India will not dramatically change till we learn to value books.

A bookstore has thousands of titles to sell. You need to be the guy the store attendant recommends to the reader.

It is important to send your work to as many publishers as possible. For every one publisher who may show interest in your work, there will be at least five who will reject you.