Amitava Kumar

Any real piece of writing is an act of courage.

— Amitava Kumar

I identify in some measure with each of my characters.

— Amitava Kumar

There is no beginning that is a blank page,

— Amitava Kumar

Criticism is, or ought to be, a judicious act.

— Amitava Kumar

I am an artless serf of Cupid.

— Amitava Kumar

My favourite writer is John Maxwell Coetzee.

— Amitava Kumar

Most writers censor themselves in awful ways. I do, too.

— Amitava Kumar

The lives of the young are so tumultuous.

— Amitava Kumar

The border is a marketplace. The invisible hand of the powerful governs the crossings.

— Amitava Kumar

Neither the writer nor the reader can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely.

— Amitava Kumar

I'm not ashamed to confess that I often note down many of the crazy things my children say.

— Amitava Kumar

While I ridicule books of self-help, I'm also quite susceptible to them. They help simplify things.

— Amitava Kumar

It's so easy for folks to normalize their opinions, to engage in a groupthink that is damaging.

— Amitava Kumar

For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I had imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the non-resident Indian.

— Amitava Kumar

A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.

— Amitava Kumar

Why does the American cyberindustry have a thing for Indians?

— Amitava Kumar

Each employed immigrant has his or her place of work. It is only the taxi driver, forever moving on wheels, who occupies…

— Amitava Kumar

Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes…

— Amitava Kumar

I have always kept notes and have kept letters from my friends and mother, which is rather depressing, as it takes you…

— Amitava Kumar

A postcolonial writer who has often been credited with mixing the mundane with the magical, and history with fiction, is Salman Rushdie.

— Amitava Kumar

We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of…

— Amitava Kumar

We live in a cynical system where the powerful are able to exploit the demand of the aggressive few, from whichever religion…

— Amitava Kumar

Inequality reigns in horrifying ways, and not everyone can even read, but the world of media and advertising withholds very little from…

— Amitava Kumar

Everything in American public life, when it comes to race relations, serves as a frame for a history of violence and degrading…

— Amitava Kumar

Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said…

— Amitava Kumar

In the U.S., the FBI or the people I met from the Department of Justice might be ignorant about Islam or about…

— Amitava Kumar

Does the entry of Indian H-1B worker augur a change in the relations of production in the world of cybertechnology? No, but…

— 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…

— Amitava Kumar

India allows you the luxury of a million inequalities. You can be a schoolboy selling tea to passengers sitting in a state…

— Amitava Kumar

Even fake news tries to convince us of its reality, but it does so mostly by appealing to your preconceived notions, your…

— Amitava Kumar

When we were getting married the Hindu way in Arrah, we had an old guest who asked my wife what her 'good…

— Amitava Kumar

Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully…

— Amitava Kumar

We take literature too seriously.

— Amitava Kumar

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

— Amitava Kumar

No civilization has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry.

— Amitava Kumar

Novels describe what it means to be alive at a given moment.

— Amitava Kumar

I think criticism is often so pallid, so tame. I wish it were more performative.

— Amitava Kumar

To my mind, a journalist needs to espouse objectivity and distance, while a writer practises an art that is more free.

— Amitava Kumar

Much of what we regard as truth in the war on terror is actually rather suspect.

— Amitava Kumar

Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way.

— Amitava Kumar