Top 100 Ashwin Sanghi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Battles are won and lost before they are fought.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

2. “JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter manuscript was rejected 12 times. Stephen King’s Carrie was rejected 30 times. Gone With The Wind was rejected 38 times. I was immensely proud to have beaten them all.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

3. “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

4. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step unless you missed it.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

5. “Worry is like a rocking chair; it keeps you in motion but gets you nowhere.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

6. “Vish, the creator; and Shiv, the destroyer, are simply two faces of the very same coin.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

7. “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.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

8. “The greater fool theory states that the price of an object is determined not by its intrinsic value, but rather by irrational beliefs and expectations of market participants.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

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

— Ashwin Sanghi

10. “O Rakshas, everything is always all right in the end. If it isn’t all right, then it isn’t the end.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

11. “Entrepreneurs are not risk takers. They are calculated risk takers.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

12. “What should a man strive for? Kama – love, dharma – duty, artha – wealth, and moksha – salvation.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

13. “Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?”

— Ashwin Sanghi

14. “A myth is a lie that conceals or reveals a truth. But if it reveals even a strand of history or truth, that’s what gets my adrenaline going.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

15. “Everything is going to be right at the end. If it’s not right, then it is not the end.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

16. “I believe that every writer evolves with every successive novel. I view myself as work-in-progress.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

17. “The kindest word in the world is the unkind word left unsaid.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

18. “I would like to remind this audience that sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

19. “Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in life.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

20. “Politics is like a stage. Each politician plays his part according to the lines that are given to him. But backstage, the hero and the villain enjoy their drink together. Everybody.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

21. “When you don’t know what to do, do nothing. Get quiet so you can hear the still, small voice, your inner GPS guiding you to true North.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

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

— Ashwin Sanghi

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

— Ashwin Sanghi

24. “Character is what you are. Reputation is what people think you are.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

25. “A young musician asked Mozart, ‘Herr Mozart, it has been suggested to me that I write a symphony. Would you be good enough to tell me how to go about it?’ Mozart thought for a moment and gently suggested, ‘You are still too young to write symphonies. Why not try ballads first?’ ‘You wrote symphonies when you were ten years old,’ argued the young man indignantly. ‘Ah, yes, but I didn’t ask how,’ replied Mozart.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

26. “To remain standing one often has to fall.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

27. “Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

28. “It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

29. “Do you know that there are twenty-four letters in the Gayatri Mantra and 24,000 shlokas in Valmiki’s Ramayana? The first letter of every thousandth shloka from Valmiki’s Ramayana, when put together, miraculously results in the Gayatri Mantra. Mathematics yet again. It’s all around you!”

— Ashwin Sanghi

30. “The Egyptians saw the sun and called him Ra, the Sun God. He rode across the sky in his chariot until it was time to sleep. Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise and poor Ra lost his divinity.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

31. “If a man tells a woman she’s beautiful, she’ll overlook most of his other lies!”

— Ashwin Sanghi

32. “When lions fight over a goat, it’s usually the hyena that gets away with the prize.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

33. “While I can’t walk on water, I can certainly wobble on whisky.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

34. “Never judge a book by its cover; a movie by its book; or a video game by its movie.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

35. “Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

36. “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!”

— Ashwin Sanghi

37. “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.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

38. “It is the manner of death that reveals the importance of a man. Ordinary people are murdered while extraordinary people are assassinated.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

39. “There’s a touch of belief within every doubter and a touch of doubt within every believer.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

40. “The lesson for today, dear Rakshas, is between two evils you should pick the one that you haven’t yet tried.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

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

— Ashwin Sanghi

42. “The cleanest book on a dusty bookshelf is usually a dirty one.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

43. “Vipassana proponents always stress that if you are insulted by someone and get angry, the result is not the abuser’s fault. It is your fault because you choose to react.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

44. “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.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

45. “What I would not like is to be ignored. I write from the heart. I don’t write for me. I write for my readers.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

46. “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.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

47. “In order to become the master, a ruler must profess to be a servant of the people.”

— Ashwin Sanghi

48. “A man who opens his mouth too often may end up meeting a tragic end, either from indigestion or execution!”

— Ashwin Sanghi

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

— Ashwin Sanghi

50. “She could not be called beautiful in the traditional sense, but there was a particular quality in her that simply set the fertile imagination of any testosterone-bearing man into overdrive.”

— Ashwin Sanghi