Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
To write what is not dead on the page, one has to be open to all kinds of disturbances and challenges and… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
While I ridicule books of self-help, I'm also quite susceptible to them. They help simplify things. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
'An Obedient Father' is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote 'The God… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
When I close my eyes and think of a writer, I don't imagine him or her as someone who is sitting above… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Mistaken identity, of course, has been the province of much postcolonial fiction. An important feature of this writing is the manner in… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Even fake news tries to convince us of its reality, but it does so mostly by appealing to your preconceived notions, your… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
It is clear from Salman Rushdie's writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
I was pretty aimless as a youth, especially in Patna. I think reading saved me. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Writing gives me the license to go, explore, and learn about the world. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
I like listening to Garrison Keillor's 'The Writer's Almanac' with my daughter. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
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… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
We live in a cynical system where the powerful are able to exploit the demand of the aggressive few, from whichever religion or group,… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps,… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
All good works of art must ask this question: 'You want to breathe free, yes, but do you know how to kiss?' — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
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… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
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… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes.… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
The thing about good art is that it makes you look at things in a new way. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
To write what is not dead on the page, one has to be open to all kinds of disturbances and challenges and confusion. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
Inequality reigns in horrifying ways, and not everyone can even read, but the world of media and advertising withholds very little from the imagination… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share
