AMITAVA KUMAR

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.

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

One of my earliest lessons in guilt was imparted in childhood through the story of the death of Mahatma Gandhi's father.

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.

I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.

For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I had imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the non-resident Indian.

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.

Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely.

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.

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.

Writing gives me the license to go, explore, and learn about the world.

When I close my eyes and think of a writer, I don't imagine him or her as someone who is sitting above me on a pedestal, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice in one hand! No, I see sentences.

Muslim anger has, of course, been stoked by America's war in Iraq and by Israel's brutal policies toward Palestine and Lebanon.

I haven't reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat.

The lives of the young are so tumultuous.

It's so easy for folks to normalize their opinions, to engage in a groupthink that is damaging.

Capitalism might everywhere be spreading havoc, but it is also triumphant everywhere.

Most writers censor themselves in awful ways. I do, too.

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.

We take literature too seriously.

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.

Why does the American cyberindustry have a thing for Indians?

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!

My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality.

I think criticism is often so pallid, so tame. I wish it were more performative.