AKHIL SHARMA

We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.

I think immigrants, when they're stressed, think that there's something wrong with America, when it's really just difficult to leave a country and all that you know.

I thought it was quite wonderful coming to America. I think immigration is a very difficult thing, but America is a very wonderful place.

It's easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don't want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.

I don't really revise. I tend to rewrite.

We are often unaware of how much we love the people around us. This is true for everyone. We may think that we love certain people, but we don't know how profoundly we love them.

When someone gets a success, and we, too, have done good work and sometimes even better work than the person who has just triumphed, we wonder: 'Why did success pass me by?'

'Family Life' is a blueprint of my life. It was horrible and physically gruesome in a way the book doesn't attempt to capture. It was emotionally very bleak.

I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir.

During my breakdown, many things, tiny things I had not even registered before, had begun to torment me with guilt. I used to steal Splenda from Starbucks. I would go into a Starbucks whenever I needed the sweetener and would take a fistful of packets, even when I didn't buy a coffee.

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.

I think that books are fundamentally educational.

My parents are deeply pious Hindus.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

I am shamelessly biased about the people in my life, and it makes sense to me that other people are the same.

I know how to write fiction well.

My wife is the most wonderful woman in the world, and my parents are the most extraordinary father and mother.

Writing about what happened to my brother and to my family was awful. It was hard to look back at how much suffering there was and at how certain bad situations were made worse by our decisions.

When you read Chekhov, everything has an even gray tone. When you read 'Family Life', everything has an even white tone. It is almost like when you paint on paper, and you can see the paper through the paint.

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

For me, a lot of the humor comes not from innocence but from characters trying to figure out how to get what they need. I don't try to be funny, but am relieved when an opportunity comes up for humor.

I need to tell the things that are important but which don't make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.

It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.

Certainly the details of our life are unique. Spending time thinking of how I am different from someone else, however, does not tend to be very productive.

As a human being living one's life, one is more open to relief when there is rain or the expectation of rain. That readiness for hope gets manifested in my stories and that of many other Indian writers.