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.'
Amitava Kumar
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.
Our public culture is one in which only the young and the beautiful will succeed. If you're forty, you're finished.
Novels describe what it means to be alive at a given moment.
All good works of art must ask this question: 'You want to breathe free, yes, but do you know how to kiss?'
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.
I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny.
I was seen as a traitor for marrying a Muslim - a Pakistani at that.
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?
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 was pretty aimless as a youth, especially in Patna. I think reading saved me.
Most writers censor themselves in awful ways. I do, too.
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 haven't reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat.
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.
No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry.
While I ridicule books of self-help, I'm also quite susceptible to them. They help simplify things.
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.
In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.
Like every other self-respecting academic, I'm distrustful of self-help books.
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.
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.
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.
Capitalism might everywhere be spreading havoc, but it is also triumphant everywhere.
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.
In the early 1990s, my relatives in Patna, even those who had no interest in reading or writing, wanted Parker fountain pens.
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.
Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.
The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.
Inequality reigns in horrifying ways, and not everyone can even read, but the world of media and advertising withholds very little from the imagination of the dispossessed.
Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way.
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.
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.
I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life.
What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.
'An Obedient Father' is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote 'The God of Small Things.'
If India breaks your heart with untold inequalities, it also surprises you with the unheralded achievements of its most humble citizens.
Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely.
I think criticism is often so pallid, so tame. I wish it were more performative.
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.
Criticism is, or ought to be, a judicious act.
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.
The thing about good art is that it makes you look at things in a new way.
A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.
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.
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.
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.
It is clear from Salman Rushdie's writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political.
Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities.
