A biography for Amitava Kumarhasn’t been written yet.
“I identify in some measure with each of my characters.”
“I have a couple of thick files about things that have gone wrong between people; I ought to write about them in the manner of a thriller. It would finally convince me that I was a real writer.”
“There is a great deal of freshness and charm in '400 Blows.' There is also a great deal of visual poetry in the way in which Truffaut's camera looks at his beloved city.”
“In academe, we ought to temper our criticism of the idea of self-help because, in a more complex way, it is precisely what we offer our students through our teaching.”
“In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.”
“I think criticism is often so pallid, so tame. I wish it were more performative.”
“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.”
“A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.”
“I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.”
“The radio stations will happily recycle a badly worded statement by a politician all day but will steer clear of broadcasting more than once or twice a poem by Tomas Transtromer or Rita Dove.”
“It is clear from Salman Rushdie's writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political.”
“Why does the American cyberindustry have a thing for Indians?”
“I grew up in India during the 1960s and '70s in a meat-eating Hindu family. Only my mother and my grandparents were vegetarians. The rest of us enjoyed eating - on special occasions - chicken or fish or mutton.”
“I am an artless serf of Cupid.”
“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.”
“In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.”
“One of my earliest lessons in guilt was imparted in childhood through the story of the death of Mahatma Gandhi's father.”
“Our public culture is one in which only the young and the beautiful will succeed. If you're forty, you're finished.”
“I haven't reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat.”
“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.”