Quotes from Amitava Kumar

I didn't know V. S. Naipaul very well, and to a large extent, my acquaintance with him was limited to meetings at literary festivals.

The lives of the young are so tumultuous.

The radio stations will happily recycle a badly worded statement by a politician all day but will steer clear of broadcasting more than once or twice a poem by Tomas Transtromer or Rita Dove.

I've immersed myself in reading more and more of American literature, but no editor has asked me to comment on Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan. It is assumed I'm an expert on writers who need a little less suntan lotion at the beach.

We live in a cynical system where the powerful are able to exploit the demand of the aggressive few, from whichever religion or group, to bargain for more power or cynical advantage.

In the way in which we are living in a much more explosive and more tension-filled society, a society that is driven with more and more contradictions, it is but unavoidable that some of this will also come into cinema. I would, in fact, argue that a part of it is borrowed from Hollywood. It's as if Quentin Tarantino has come to Mumbai.

I grew up in India during the 1960s and '70s in a meat-eating Hindu family. Only my mother and my grandparents were vegetarians. The rest of us enjoyed eating - on special occasions - chicken or fish or mutton.

In the U.S., the FBI or the people I met from the Department of Justice might be ignorant about Islam or about the East more generally, but I felt they were less willing to make blanket judgments about Muslims. This caution was less evident with some of the authorities I met in India.

India's nuclear-test blasts have pretty much put to rest the myth of Indians being peace-loving Gandhians.

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

The thing about good art is that it makes you look at things in a new way.

Governance in India comes in the iron-clad armour of bureaucracy. Anyone in uniform considers it his or her right that we regard them as some sort of deity.

With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.

I'm not ashamed to confess that I often note down many of the crazy things my children say.

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.

To my mind, a journalist needs to espouse objectivity and distance, while a writer practises an art that is more free.

Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world.

If India breaks your heart with untold inequalities, it also surprises you with the unheralded achievements of its most humble citizens.

I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me as a challenge, is the idea of doing strange things with what is real. Take what is real and make it more or less real.

An essay is not an op-ed that tells its reader what to think. An essay is a complicated working-out of one's own contradictions and complicities.

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

A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.

The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.

India allows you the luxury of a million inequalities. You can be a schoolboy selling tea to passengers sitting in a state transport bus, but you are royalty when compared to a shirtless, barefoot village boy, from what was traditionally considered an untouchable caste, living on snails and small fish - and sometimes rats.