Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way.
— Amitava Kumar
With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.
You ask a politician a question, like, why they ran in an election, and you'll hear, I assume, something about wanting to contribute to the community or bring about social justice. I had no such high goals.
Much of what we regard as truth in the war on terror is actually rather suspect.
I was pretty aimless as a youth, especially in Patna. I think reading saved me.
What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.
Why does the American cyberindustry have a thing for Indians?
Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.
To my mind, a journalist needs to espouse objectivity and distance, while a writer practises an art that is more free.
Such is the impurity of our enterprise, as writers or as critics, that even in the act of proclaiming our freedom from the demands of authenticity, we are never free from brandishing it.
The lives of the young are so tumultuous.
In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything, and that is the attraction of writing fiction.
Hindi writing, as well as Hindi journalism, is a great gift to Indian writing.
Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely.
Muslim anger has, of course, been stoked by America's war in Iraq and by Israel's brutal policies toward Palestine and Lebanon.
A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie's novel 'Fury' earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at the college where I teach, and who had invited Rushdie to come speak, that he wouldn't share the stage with me.
The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.
Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.
I identify in some measure with each of my characters.
In the U.S., the FBI or the people I met from the Department of Justice might be ignorant about Islam or about the East more generally, but I felt they were less willing to make blanket judgments about Muslims. This caution was less evident with some of the authorities I met in India.
My favourite writer is John Maxwell Coetzee.
I should not romanticize the simplicity of a village. For instance, the place from where I used to buy a packet of glucose biscuits in my village is now selling cellphones.
What is said by the person holding a megaphone inciting a crowd, or what is said by someone who incites a rumour? And what is the difference between that person and me, sitting in my room imagining something, telling a story?
Capitalism might everywhere be spreading havoc, but it is also triumphant everywhere.
For me to say that all novels in English written by Indians are all alike would be a bit like saying that all the cows in India look the same and have identical horns.
A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general rule, it holds true.
Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.
I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny.
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.
Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes and cinema houses, village squares, and half-forgotten libraries.
Indian writers in English are rank individualists. Even among the progressives, there is a strain of anti-leftism, or at least a suspicion of any organized politics.
No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry.
Criticism is, or ought to be, a judicious act.
It is clear from Salman Rushdie's writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political.
We take literature too seriously.
A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.
Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.
Writing gives me the license to go, explore, and learn about the world.
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.
Does the entry of Indian H-1B worker augur a change in the relations of production in the world of cybertechnology? No, but the presence of such workers - their skills and their histories - introduce contradictions into the system that are not always easily absorbed or dissolved.
In 'Bombay-London-New York,' I speak of the ways in which the 'soft' emotion of nostalgia is turned into the 'hard' emotion of fundamentalism.
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.
For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I had imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the non-resident Indian.
My own personal conviction is that if I were writing without thinking about how images or how journalism is creating a world for us, I would not be happy about it.
My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality.
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!
In the way in which we are living in a much more explosive and more tension-filled society, a society that is driven with more and more contradictions, it is but unavoidable that some of this will also come into cinema. I would, in fact, argue that a part of it is borrowed from Hollywood. It's as if Quentin Tarantino has come to Mumbai.
For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance.
Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities.
