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