Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Hindi writing, as well as Hindi journalism, is a great gift to Indian writing. — 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
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
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
A postcolonial writer who has often been credited with mixing the mundane with the magical, and history with fiction, is Salman Rushdie. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
My own personal conviction is that if I were writing without thinking about how images or how journalism is creating a world… — 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
I arrived in the U.S. for graduate study in literature in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I… — Amitava Kumar 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
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
I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie's novel 'Fury' earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at… — 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
Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world. — 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
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 have long held that many of the writers and artists working in the aftermath of 9/11 have presented a faux familiarity… — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
To my mind, a journalist needs to espouse objectivity and distance, while a writer practises an art that is more free. — 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
In the early 1990s, my relatives in Patna, even those who had no interest in reading or writing, wanted Parker fountain pens. — Amitava Kumar Copy Share Image
Indian writers in English are rank individualists. Even among the progressives, there is a strain of anti-leftism, or at least a suspicion… — Amitava Kumar 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 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 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 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
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 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 Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
