Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Do what I will never do.
She has the gift of accepting her life.
Sexy means loving someone you donot know.
You remind me of everything that followed.
One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.
The Italians always know that I'm not Italian.
Isolation offered its own form of companionship
Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.
A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing
Writing is so humbling; there's no confidence involved.
I love Rome. I'm very happy there. I wasn't in New York.
I started writing after college, slowly, secretly writing.
A writer has to true to him or herself. Period. That’s it!
Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.
With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before
War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war.
That's what books are for... to travel without moving an inch.
All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.
The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading.
Many of my characters struggle with loneliness, that is fair to say.
One week after moving to Rome, I started writing in my diary in Italian.
I have very little choice. If I don't write, I feel dreadful. So I write.
Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.
I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.
I tend to read mostly 20th-century fiction, 20th-, 21st-century fiction in Italian.
Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.
I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation.
We are all #humans and we all make #mistakes. We #hurt people even if we don't want to.
Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I'm also more exposed.
Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.
Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.
I've always been searching to arrive at a certain voice that will probably elude me forever.
On the technical side, I hope that my writing is evolving and maturing, ripening, deepening.
I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.
The essential dilemma of my life is between my deep desire to belong and my suspicion of belonging.
She supposed that all those years of loving a person who was dishonest had taught her a few things.
In Italy, where I live now, I have put some distance between myself and the world that has formed me.
The highlight of my undergraduate years was a year-long Shakespeare course I took with Edward Tayler.
Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.
I write about characters that interest me. And I don't think of my books as being forms of entertainment.
When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away.
There's more than enough in the world I am currently writing about to last for several lifetimes of writing.
I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.
I'm from Kingston, R.I., sort of on the University of Rhode Island campus - on the margins of that, actually.
I feel as though I've gotten to a point where I don't really want to set a book in any real place ever again.
Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.
Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.
Books seem so much more - much more sacred to me, and more important and essential, than they were when I was young.
My parents' relationship with Kolkata is so strong. Growing up, the absence of Kolkata was always present in our lives.