Quotes from Amitava Kumar

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

I was pretty aimless as a youth, especially in Patna. I think reading saved me.

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.

I thought I'd be the first to introduce herbal tea to Patna. White tea, ginger tea, rooibos, camomile. No one touched it. On subsequent visits, I'd find the packets decorating the shelves in my parents' dining room.

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.

Like every other self-respecting academic, I'm distrustful of self-help books.

It is clear from Salman Rushdie's writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political.

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.

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.

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

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.

To write what is not dead on the page, one has to be open to all kinds of disturbances and challenges and confusion.

While I ridicule books of self-help, I'm also quite susceptible to them. They help simplify things.

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.

In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.

Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities.

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

There is no point in fighting condescension with condescension.

Toni Morrison read The New York Times every day with pen in hand, making corrections she felt necessary, deleting words or inserting them as she went along.

The nostalgia I had come to treasure was a hypertrophied sense of the past as a place, a place with street signs and a figure atop a staircase that I recognized.

The truth, Your Honor, is that the immigrant feels at home in guilt... the guilt of having abandoned my parents. A slippery slope, this. My father, my mother, my motherland, my mother tongue.

Novels describe what it means to be alive at a given moment.

Each employed immigrant has his or her place of work. It is only the taxi driver, forever moving on wheels, who occupies no fixed space. He represents the immigrant condition.

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