Words matter. These are the best Amitava Kumar Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
For me to say that all novels in English written by Indians are all alike would be a bit like saying that all the cows in India look the same and have identical horns.
I identify in some measure with each of my characters.
Our public culture is one in which only the young and the beautiful will succeed. If you’re forty, you’re finished.
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.
I was seen as a traitor for marrying a Muslim – a Pakistani at that.
The thing about good art is that it makes you look at things in a new way.
I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.
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.
Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities.
Why does the American cyberindustry have a thing for Indians?
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.
I don’t think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny.
Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way.
To write what is not dead on the page, one has to be open to all kinds of disturbances and challenges and confusion.
Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely.
‘An Obedient Father’ is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote ‘The God of Small Things.’
One of my earliest lessons in guilt was imparted in childhood through the story of the death of Mahatma Gandhi’s father.
It is clear from Salman Rushdie’s writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political.
My favourite writer is John Maxwell Coetzee.
I arrived in the U.S. for graduate study in literature in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I began to paint, even though I had come to the U.S. intending to become a writer.
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.
I’m generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life.
India’s nuclear-test blasts have pretty much put to rest the myth of Indians being peace-loving Gandhians.
A wonderful innovation of the Occupy Wall Street movement was the use of the human microphone – the name given to the body of the audience repeating, amplifying, each statement made by the speaker.
A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general rule, it holds true.
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.
Hemingway’s short story ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway’s ‘iceberg theory,’ which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.
You ask a politician a question, like, why they ran in an election, and you’ll hear, I assume, something about wanting to contribute to the community or bring about social justice. I had no such high goals.
Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.
I’m not ashamed to confess that I often note down many of the crazy things my children say.
Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world.
I have long held that many of the writers and artists working in the aftermath of 9/11 have presented a faux familiarity with the so-called terrorist mind.
All good works of art must ask this question: ‘You want to breathe free, yes, but do you know how to kiss?’
Muslim anger has, of course, been stoked by America’s war in Iraq and by Israel’s brutal policies toward Palestine and Lebanon.
Mistaken identity, of course, has been the province of much postcolonial fiction. An important feature of this writing is the manner in which misrecognition has haunted all cognition.
We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps, but in the differences that thrive behind settled, more clear-cut divisions.
My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality.
For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I had imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the non-resident Indian.
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.
While I ridicule books of self-help, I’m also quite susceptible to them. They help simplify things.
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.
Inequality reigns in horrifying ways, and not everyone can even read, but the world of media and advertising withholds very little from the imagination of the dispossessed.
Any real piece of writing is an act of courage.
It’s so easy for folks to normalize their opinions, to engage in a groupthink that is damaging.
If the 20th century was marked by travel – planes in flight – then the events of 9/11 ushered in the age of the burning aftermath.
Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel’s more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.
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.
I have to tell you, when I hear the song ‘Jiya ho Bihar ke Lala,’ I want to throw the history books out of the window and dance!
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.
Writing gives me the license to go, explore, and learn about the world.
In the early 1990s, my relatives in Patna, even those who had no interest in reading or writing, wanted Parker fountain pens.
If India breaks your heart with untold inequalities, it also surprises you with the unheralded achievements of its most humble citizens.
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.
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?
Like every other self-respecting academic, I’m distrustful of self-help books.
A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.
I think criticism is often so pallid, so tame. I wish it were more performative.
A postcolonial writer who has often been credited with mixing the mundane with the magical, and history with fiction, is Salman Rushdie.
Criticism is, or ought to be, a judicious act.
An essay is not an op-ed that tells its reader what to think. An essay is a complicated working-out of one’s own contradictions and complicities.
I didn’t know V. S. Naipaul very well, and to a large extent, my acquaintance with him was limited to meetings at literary festivals.
No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry.
Novels describe what it means to be alive at a given moment.
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.
A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie’s novel ‘Fury’ earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at the college where I teach, and who had invited Rushdie to come speak, that he wouldn’t share the stage with me.
For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance.
