102 Quotes by Amitava Kumar

I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me as a challenge, is the idea of doing strange things with what is real. Take what is real and make it more or less real.

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

I have a couple of thick files about things that have gone wrong between people; I ought to write about them in the manner of a thriller. It would finally convince me that I was a real writer.

Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.

I was seen as a traitor for marrying a Muslim - a Pakistani at that.

Such is the impurity of our enterprise, as writers or as critics, that even in the act of proclaiming our freedom from the demands of authenticity, we are never free from brandishing it.

I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.

A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general rule, it holds true.

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