Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely. — Amitava Kumar Books Copy Share Image
It's so easy for folks to normalize their opinions, to engage in a groupthink that is damaging. — 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 Books Copy Share Image
I'm not ashamed to confess that I often note down many of the crazy things my children say. — Amitava Kumar Children Copy Share Image
It is clear from Salman Rushdie's writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political. — Amitava Kumar Literature Copy Share Image
All good works of art must ask this question: 'You want to breathe free, yes, but do you know how to kiss?' — Amitava Kumar Art Copy Share Image
Hindi writing, as well as Hindi journalism, is a great gift to Indian writing. — Amitava Kumar Gift Copy Share Image
In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions. — Amitava Kumar Immigrants 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 Books Copy Share Image
What is said by the person holding a megaphone inciting a crowd, or what is said by someone who incites a rumour?… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Everything in American public life, when it comes to race relations, serves as a frame for a history of violence and degrading… — 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 Authenticity 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 Books Copy Share Image
I have a couple of thick files about things that have gone wrong between people; I ought to write about them in… — Amitava Kumar People Copy Share Image
In 'Bombay-London-New York,' I speak of the ways in which the 'soft' emotion of nostalgia is turned into the 'hard' emotion of… — Amitava Kumar Fundamentalism Copy Share Image
In academe, we ought to temper our criticism of the idea of self-help because, in a more complex way, it is precisely… — Amitava Kumar Criticism Copy Share Image
“There is no point in fighting condescension with condescension.” — Amitava Kumar Condescension Copy Share Image
I was pretty aimless as a youth, especially in Patna. I think reading saved me. — Amitava Kumar Aimless Copy Share Image
Like every other self-respecting academic, I'm distrustful of self-help books. — Amitava Kumar Books Copy Share Image
Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world. — Amitava Kumar Interest Copy Share Image
The thing about good art is that it makes you look at things in a new way. — Amitava Kumar Art 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 Books Copy Share Image
India's nuclear-test blasts have pretty much put to rest the myth of Indians being peace-loving Gandhians. — Amitava Kumar Being Copy Share Image
I like listening to Garrison Keillor's 'The Writer's Almanac' with my daughter. — Amitava Kumar Children Copy Share Image
Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Capitalism might everywhere be spreading havoc, but it is also triumphant everywhere. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning. — 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
Each employed immigrant has his or her place of work. It is only the taxi driver, forever moving on wheels, who occupies… — Amitava Kumar Immigrant Copy Share Image
Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes… — Amitava Kumar Books Copy Share Image
I have always kept notes and have kept letters from my friends and mother, which is rather depressing, as it takes you… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
A postcolonial writer who has often been credited with mixing the mundane with the magical, and history with fiction, is Salman Rushdie. — Amitava Kumar Fiction Copy Share Image
We live in a cynical system where the powerful are able to exploit the demand of the aggressive few, from whichever religion… — Amitava Kumar Cynical Copy Share Image
Inequality reigns in horrifying ways, and not everyone can even read, but the world of media and advertising withholds very little from… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of… — Amitava Kumar Differences Copy Share Image
I've immersed myself in reading more and more of American literature, but no editor has asked me to comment on Jonathan Franzen… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using… — Amitava Kumar Books Copy Share Image
Such is the impurity of our enterprise, as writers or as critics, that even in the act of proclaiming our freedom from… — Amitava Kumar Authenticity Copy Share Image
For me to say that all novels in English written by Indians are all alike would be a bit like saying that… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
