Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Amitava Kumar

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

In academe, we ought to temper our criticism of the idea of self-help because, in a more complex way, it is precisely what we offer our students through our teaching.

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.

A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie's novel 'Fury' earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at the college where I teach, and who had invited Rushdie to come speak, that he wouldn't share the stage with me.

I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny.

Even fake news tries to convince us of its reality, but it does so mostly by appealing to your preconceived notions, your shared biases, or your prejudice. How to do the opposite? To create a sense of the real and then challenge your biases. I think that is my favourite aspect of writing, and that is what I've tried to do in 'The Lovers.'

No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry.

Criticism is, or ought to be, a judicious act.

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

In 'Bombay-London-New York,' I speak of the ways in which the 'soft' emotion of nostalgia is turned into the 'hard' emotion of fundamentalism.

Hindi writing, as well as Hindi journalism, is a great gift to Indian writing.

Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.

Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.

My favourite writer is John Maxwell Coetzee.

Why does the American cyberindustry have a thing for Indians?

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.

Such is the impurity of our enterprise, as writers or as critics, that even in the act of proclaiming our freedom from the demands of authenticity, we are never free from brandishing it.

Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.

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

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

Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way.

I was seen as a traitor for marrying a Muslim - a Pakistani at that.

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.

The lives of the young are so tumultuous.

Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes and cinema houses, village squares, and half-forgotten libraries.

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.

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.

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.

We take literature too seriously.

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

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

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

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

Does the entry of Indian H-1B worker augur a change in the relations of production in the world of cybertechnology? No, but the presence of such workers - their skills and their histories - introduce contradictions into the system that are not always easily absorbed or dissolved.

I identify in some measure with each of my characters.

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!

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.

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

My own personal conviction is that if I were writing without thinking about how images or how journalism is creating a world for us, I would not be happy about it.

Much of what we regard as truth in the war on terror is actually rather suspect.

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.

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.

A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general rule, it holds true.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I should not romanticize the simplicity of a village. For instance, the place from where I used to buy a packet of glucose biscuits in my village is now selling cellphones.

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

For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance.

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

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

When we were getting married the Hindu way in Arrah, we had an old guest who asked my wife what her 'good name' was. I think she'd heard that I had married a Muslim. When my wife said, 'Mona Ahmed Ali,' the lady looked at me and exclaimed, 'Oh, so you've married a terrorist.'

I have a couple of thick files about things that have gone wrong between people; I ought to write about them in the manner of a thriller. It would finally convince me that I was a real writer.

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

We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps, but in the differences that thrive behind settled, more clear-cut divisions.

What is said by the person holding a megaphone inciting a crowd, or what is said by someone who incites a rumour? And what is the difference between that person and me, sitting in my room imagining something, telling a story?