Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I see flaws as a kind of beauty.
Terrorists are as torn as anyone else.
Literature has become too psychological.
If Asian America exists, it is because of systemic racism.
The thing about a failure is that it is possible to deny it forever.
Asian-Americans are still regarded as 'other' by many of their fellow-citizens.
There's a hustling, but also a self-centred vibe you can get from people in Delhi.
Terrorists have goals beyond their supposed pacts with God. They are authors, too.
New York City has no need to move on from 9/11 because, in a sense, it moved on days after, moments after.
Apparently, the city of Delhi is a 'character' in my novels. I'd argue that it's a ... city... in my novels.
Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call.
I'm good at description and imparting flow to a story, but I don't necessarily understand the value of long scenes.
The deadpan brilliance of John McCrea has been underrepresented in music since 2004, when Cake served up 'Pressure Chief.'
I think there is a chance that Indian writers in America will start producing very interesting books in the years to come.
As a Punjabi, you only have to look at your own family's past to find horror stories about arranged marriages and brutality.
When I had worked on my first book, I had readily shown bits and pieces to everyone - for encouragement, to force myself to write.
I travelled around small-town India a lot for a job from 2010-2012, and I was impressed by the energy I encountered in these places.
People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.
American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won't violate one another's privacies. This makes it a land of small talk.
Muslims remain the most convenient target for prejudice in a city like Delhi, which is far more ghettoized than Bombay or Bangalore, for example.
When more Chinese started coming after the Gold Rush, employed on large projects like the Pacific Railroad, anti-Chinese sentiment became shrill.
It's very good for us to say, as liberals, that we should be moved by everything, but the fact is that there's just so much competing for our attention.
In some ways, the best novel about terrorism, though it's not a novel, is 'The Looming Tower' by Lawrence Wright or 'Perfect Soldiers' by Terry McDermott.
The feeling I got from my research is that the victims of bombings end up becoming as alienated from the government as the terrorists who cause the attacks.
Every time a blast happens, people ask, 'But why would someone do this?' Weirdly, it hasn't been answered well anywhere - neither in fiction nor non-fiction.
For whatever reason, people know that car crashes can happen but they don't live with that fear every day when they're driving, or they're able to overcome it.
In the five months I wrote the final draft of 'The Association of Small Bombs,' I never fell out of the book. The world was real to me: plausible and powerful.
I also think that there's something about the graphic, political nature of such attacks, mixed with the fact that it all seems completely random to the victims.
I think people have turned terrorists into these larger-than-life devils and so are unable to write about them in the obvious way, which is as human, petty, bumbling.
How do you prevent attacks from becoming the very fabric of lived life in a city? Of course it's very easy to say you should be fearless and go about your daily life.
I'm more interested than Philip Roth in understanding women, even if I do it imperfectly. But that book, Portnoy's Complaint, is literary punk in this way that is rare.
When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.
There is not one New York but thousands - mixed-up conurbations and microclimates with their own internal logics and charms, dreams and juxtapositions, faces and tongues.
I lived in Brooklyn from 2007 to 2012 but for the last few years have resided in Austin, Texas, where my world - especially the world of downtown - is predominantly white.
The West, in the form of American capitalism, is seen as having won, but people are beginning to offer alternatives again, sometimes in retrograde ways like radical Islam.
Of course I had a piece of luck I couldn't have imagine for myself in a million years: I got an agent. That sped up the process. I'd say it's a good idea, getting an agent.
Yashpal, writing in the nineteen-fifties, sought to indict this culture of men, Hindus and Muslims alike, who value their freedom and power over the rights and lives of women.
I think that a lot of terrorists have been middle class and, more surprisingly, many of them have been people who were not directly affected by the things they're angry about.
'This Is Not That Dawn' is remarkable in part for its careful and sensitive attention to women's lives - and also for its harsh critique of men and their failure to stop violence.
People are rushed and inspired by the success of Indian writers, and are falling over themselves to write novels. Every Indian is writing a novel right now. No one wants to revise.
The problem of empathy is pretty universal, and pretty much breaks down across America. People can't feel beyond their drawn borders. And skin color and culture have a lot to do with that.
Getting some distance allowed me to develop a hunger for India and to come back and explore it in a way I wouldn't have had I been living here. And that probably made me more political as well.
If India hadn't become a troubled space for me, somehow I wouldn't have any reason to write about it. So the fact that it's a lost love, or something, is why I keep thinking about it obsessively.
I met a number of young, striving, enterprising people in cities like Aligarh and Hubli. But the mental landscape of these towns is out of sync with their reality. Many of these towns are hellholes.
America going into this huge, costly, never-ending war created huge debt, which became a huge problem in Congress and led to it stalling many times, putting a halt to different kinds of social progress.
Despite my critical take on the city, I love Delhi, on the whole - love its monuments, love how easily graspable the city's turbulent history is. The negative things I write about are considered normal here.
It's the feeling right from the beginning that the government is not on your side, the government thinks you're going to use this opportunity to cheat them, even though you've just been through this huge trauma.
You can say that a small attack is one in which relatively few people die, but the minute you say that, you can sense the ironies in that statement. A blast in which five people are killed is a meaningful blast.
I have to admit that I was terrified of ending the book, precisely because I go around saying about pretty much every book I read, "It fell apart at the end." I have friends who are waiting to ridicule me forever.
People in the East get a very skewed sense of America as this enormously rapaciously sexual place, this place where you have rappers and you have Donald Trump and things like that, which leads to a lot of confusion.