Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The lives of the young are so tumultuous.
There is no beginning that is a blank page.
My favourite writer is John Maxwell Coetzee.
Criticism is, or ought to be, a judicious act.
I identify in some measure with each of my characters.
Most writers censor themselves in awful ways. I do, too.
Novels describe what it means to be alive at a given moment.
Why does the American cyberindustry have a thing for Indians?
I was seen as a traitor for marrying a Muslim - a Pakistani at that.
Writing gives me the license to go, explore, and learn about the world.
No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry.
The thing about good art is that it makes you look at things in a new way.
I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.
I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny.
Hindi writing, as well as Hindi journalism, is a great gift to Indian writing.
Like every other self-respecting academic, I'm distrustful of self-help books.
I was pretty aimless as a youth, especially in Patna. I think reading saved me.
I think criticism is often so pallid, so tame. I wish it were more performative.
Much of what we regard as truth in the war on terror is actually rather suspect.
Capitalism might everywhere be spreading havoc, but it is also triumphant everywhere.
The border is a marketplace. The invisible hand of the powerful governs the crossings.
Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely.
I'm not ashamed to confess that I often note down many of the crazy things my children say.
It's so easy for folks to normalize their opinions, to engage in a groupthink that is damaging.
A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.
Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world.
Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities.
What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.
While I ridicule books of self-help, I'm also quite susceptible to them. They help simplify things.
India's nuclear-test blasts have pretty much put to rest the myth of Indians being peace-loving Gandhians.
All good works of art must ask this question: 'You want to breathe free, yes, but do you know how to kiss?'
I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life.
In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.
For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I had imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the non-resident Indian.
Our public culture is one in which only the young and the beautiful will succeed. If you're forty, you're finished.
It is clear from Salman Rushdie's writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political.
To write what is not dead on the page, one has to be open to all kinds of disturbances and challenges and confusion.
Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way.
To my mind, a journalist needs to espouse objectivity and distance, while a writer practises an art that is more free.
One of my earliest lessons in guilt was imparted in childhood through the story of the death of Mahatma Gandhi's father.
My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality.
Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.
In the early 1990s, my relatives in Patna, even those who had no interest in reading or writing, wanted Parker fountain pens.
Muslim anger has, of course, been stoked by America's war in Iraq and by Israel's brutal policies toward Palestine and Lebanon.
The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.
I have to tell you, when I hear the song 'Jiya ho Bihar ke Lala,' I want to throw the history books out of the window and dance!
The recurring question that anyone from Bihar gets is whether Patna has improved. I'm not interested in answering that question.
If the 20th century was marked by travel - planes in flight - then the events of 9/11 ushered in the age of the burning aftermath.
I have always kept notes and have kept letters from my friends and mother, which is rather depressing, as it takes you to the past.
I didn't know V. S. Naipaul very well, and to a large extent, my acquaintance with him was limited to meetings at literary festivals.