Bharati Mukherjee

You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City…

— Bharati Mukherjee

The picture of Mother Teresa that I remember from my childhood is of a short, sari-wearing woman scurrying down a red gravel…

— Bharati Mukherjee

“It's making life important, making a single life important, rather than having a prescription for the global ills which afflict us.”

— Bharati Mukherjee

I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me.

— Bharati Mukherjee

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written…

— Bharati Mukherjee

In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who,…

— Bharati Mukherjee

One of the early tip-offs to me about the enormous changes that were going on with being in a Bangalore house, home,…

— Bharati Mukherjee

I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now…

— Bharati Mukherjee

Mother Teresa's detractors have accused her of overemphasizing Calcuttans' destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless. In the context of lost…

— Bharati Mukherjee

Dullness is a kind of luxury.

— Bharati Mukherjee

I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never…

— Bharati Mukherjee

“Love on the decline is hard to tell from love on the rise.” [From 'The Lady from Lucknow']”

— Bharati Mukherjee

The United States exists as a sovereign nation. 'America,' in contrast, exists as a myth of democracy and equal opportunity to live…

— Bharati Mukherjee

As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them…

— Bharati Mukherjee

What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?

— Bharati Mukherjee

My mother's rules had to do with feminine deportment, so I never played hard enough to break a toy or muddy my…

— Bharati Mukherjee

In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.

— Bharati Mukherjee

I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's…

— Bharati Mukherjee

I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work.…

— Bharati Mukherjee

I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand…

— Bharati Mukherjee

The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.

— Bharati Mukherjee

But, Christ, there's a difference between exotic and foreign, isn't there? Exotic means you know how to use your foreignness, or you…

— Bharati Mukherjee

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

— Bharati Mukherjee

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just 'The Other.'

— Bharati Mukherjee

In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant…

— Bharati Mukherjee