102 Quotes by Amitava Kumar

Writing gives me the license to go, explore, and learn about the world.

Our public culture is one in which only the young and the beautiful will succeed. If you're forty, you're finished.

I haven't reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat.

If India breaks your heart with untold inequalities, it also surprises you with the unheralded achievements of its most humble citizens.

Hemingway's short story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory,' which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.

I grew up in India during the 1960s and '70s in a meat-eating Hindu family. Only my mother and my grandparents were vegetarians. The rest of us enjoyed eating - on special occasions - chicken or fish or mutton.

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 complicities.

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

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