Karan Mahajan

“Every time a blast happens, people ask, 'But why would someone do this?' Weirdly, it hasn't been answered well anywhere - neither in fiction nor non-fiction.”

“No action is safe from meaning.”

“When we talk about 9/11 and 26/11 - which is the shorthand for the Mumbai attacks in 2008 - we're talking about the most successful terrorist attacks in history. When you start trying to study the most successful event of its kind, it actually doesn't make for great fiction because there isn't the kind of failure in it that fiction thrives on.”

“When I lived in Delhi, it was burdened with so many futures - fast roads, malls, flyovers - that one felt almost obliged to be hopeful. Now that hope has diminished, you can feel the city going into a frenzy to reinvent itself. I miss living there.”

“By 2013, at the age of 29, I was failing. I had left two good jobs in succession to complete a novel I'd been tooling around with since 2009, had enrolled in a graduate programme in Texas, as far away from home as possible, to finish it - and yet: what did I have to show for it after five years of work?”

“Yashpal, writing in the nineteen-fifties, sought to indict this culture of men, Hindus and Muslims alike, who value their freedom and power over the rights and lives of women.”

“The deadpan brilliance of John McCrea has been underrepresented in music since 2004, when Cake served up 'Pressure Chief.'”

“There is not one New York but thousands - mixed-up conurbations and microclimates with their own internal logics and charms, dreams and juxtapositions, faces and tongues.”

“I immigrated to the United States in 2001 for college.”

“When a certain swathe of India's population considers the country's ancient past, it doesn't see a country fragmented into kingdoms, savaged by caste divisions, and mired in poverty; rather, what's envisioned is a vast, unified Hindu empire stretching from Kashmir to the Indian tip at Kanyakumari.”

“Terrorists are people, too - they are given to error. Naipaul and then DeLillo do a good job in their novels of drawing this out: I'm thinking of DeLillo's contention in 'Mao II' that terrorists have replaced writers as the people who 'alter the inner-life of the culture.' I thought that was marvellous!”

“I think that a lot of terrorists have been middle class and, more surprisingly, many of them have been people who were not directly affected by the things they're angry about.”

“When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.”

“Like men who have failed together, they wanted nothing more than to never see each other again.”

“I remember returning to Bangalore after a few months of travel and seeing it as a first-world city, like New York or San Francisco. This may be obvious to some people, but I grew up in Delhi, and I had no experience of how someone from a 'Tier 2' city may view a 'Tier 1' city. You really do emigrate between worlds when you come from those towns.”

“The Hindu nationalists see a religion near perfection save for the tampering of Muslims and Christians. So they fall upon these groups, rather than try to reform their own practices by drawing on India's sophisticated philosophical traditions.”

“Getting some distance allowed me to develop a hunger for India and to come back and explore it in a way I wouldn't have had I been living here. And that probably made me more political as well.”

“I think there is a chance that Indian writers in America will start producing very interesting books in the years to come.”

“People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.”

“In Delhi, where I grew up, commerce is brusque. You don't ask each other how your day has been. You might not even smile. I'm not saying this is ideal - it's how it is. You're tied together by a transaction. The customer doesn't tremble before complaining about how cold his food is.”