Kiran Desai Quotes

There's no such thing as a cautious creative.

I think when you've had success, publishers and reviewers and readers are willing to let you try something new if you've already proven yourself. They're excited about what you're doing, you have people interested in it, and actually waiting for it. It's empowering.

I have a problem with censorship by the lawyer - by legal people by the publishing firm, and I may be changing publishers. They don't seem to want to take too many risks with living people.

The big cop-out would be to accept popularity rather than opting to try to create potent work. It's so easy to do the popular thing, the expected thing, and that's where you start to cheat yourself - and your fans, in the end - because there's an inherent dishonesty in pandering and dishing up what everyone's expecting.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

I don't like seeing talented storytellers ruled by fear.

There's a lack of creativity in every field because people are afraid. As an artist in this world we can do whatever we want

Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.

There's plenty of intelligence in the world, but the courage to do things differently is in short supply.

All adventuring is rash, and all innovations dangerous. But not nearly so dangerous as stagnation and dry rot. From grooves, cliques, clichés and resignation - Good Lord deliver us!

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.

We're just one cog in this giant machine. You show up and look at all the other cogs like, "Wow, everyone is the best at what they do." You're in really good hands. And that frees you up to play and feel safe, and you can take chances, creatively. You can take risks. I want to show up to work and take risks. I don't ever want to play it safe.

Most civilisation is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

I have tried to establish the right to dare everything.

You've got to take risks if you're going to succeed. I would much rather ask forgiveness than permission.

The truth is always modern and there never comes a time when it is safe to give it voice.

The most obvious inspiration to be brave is that we all feel it: you can't have free expression right now in a very wide range of countries. It takes a lot of guts for writers and journalists in those countries to stand up against repression and do what they do. Russia is a case in point where, as you know, journalists have an embarrassing habit of being killed for their reporting.

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

Free men stick their necks out.

[...] My wild words slip into fusion and risk losing the solid ground. So stranger, get wilder still. Probe the highlands.

We live in a world where art is always looked upon as the perfect medium. We live in a society where we can alter our body parts, we can act in the most perfect or right way. A lot of that is dangerous because, especially in the world of art, the chief enemy of creativity is being safe. If you're safe, you can't fall and hurt yourself. The older you are, the further down the crash is going to be. But if it works out, the higher the high.

She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.

Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ..." [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves.

Improvisation is the courage to move from one note to the next.