Words matter. These are the best Hari Kunzru Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There are still some terrible cliches in the presentation of Indian fiction. The lotus flower. The hennaed hands. In mainland Europe, people still slap these images on my books and I go bananas.
Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama’s election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening.
I’m fascinated by the emergence of a global class. They’re highly mobile; they reject the idea of place.
When I try to understand somebody, create a character, I fall into them. When I think writers are telling me what to think, I get harrumphy.
There’s nothing New York likes more than a thing. Or a place. Or a place that’s a thing. Or a thing that happens to be a place.
Intellectuals who live in Hungary, or who wish to work or lecture there, are extremely circumspect in their criticism.
I stand on my public record as a defender of the human rights of Muslims, notably my work for Moazzam Begg and other British Muslims detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay.
I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love.
In my early teens, science fiction and fantasy had an almost-total hold over my imagination. Their outcast status was part of their appeal.
There’s an explosion of Indian fiction of all kinds, from military thrillers to chicklit. I think that’s exciting.
But it’s the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That’s why I don’t just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven’t been.
Say there are three identical-looking pizza joints on a street. Two of those will always be empty. The third will have a line of people patiently waiting, checking their phones. There’s always one place that’s the place. That’s how it works.
As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold.
I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium.
I’m interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence – that it’s possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions – is fascinating.
