Kiran Desai

“I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.”

“Should humans conquer the mountain or should they wish for the mountain to possess them?”

“When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to.”

“When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.”