Amitava Kumar

“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.”

“The lives of the young are so tumultuous.”

“The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.”

“Writing gives me the license to go, explore, and learn about the world.”

“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.”

“I was seen as a traitor for marrying a Muslim - a Pakistani at that.”

“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?”

“Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way.”

“Hindi writing, as well as Hindi journalism, is a great gift to Indian writing.”

“Everything in American public life, when it comes to race relations, serves as a frame for a history of violence and degrading humiliation.”

“I've immersed myself in reading more and more of American literature, but no editor has asked me to comment on Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan. It is assumed I'm an expert on writers who need a little less suntan lotion at the beach.”

“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.”

“Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.”

“Much of what we regard as truth in the war on terror is actually rather suspect.”

“Governance in India comes in the iron-clad armour of bureaucracy. Anyone in uniform considers it his or her right that we regard them as some sort of deity.”

“Criticism is, or ought to be, a judicious act.”

“I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me as a challenge, is the idea of doing strange things with what is real. Take what is real and make it more or less real.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Each employed immigrant has his or her place of work. It is only the taxi driver, forever moving on wheels, who occupies no fixed space. He represents the immigrant condition.”