62 Quotes by Kiran Desai

What was a country but the idea of it?

She had been mistaken – she was only the center to herself, as always, and a small player playing her part in someone else’s story.

Year by year, his life wasn’t amounting to anything at all... And yet, another part of him had expanded: his self-consciousness, his self-pity – oh, the tediousness of it... Shouldn’t he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest luxury of not noticing himself at all.

If you write a lovely story about India, you're criticized for selling an exotic version of India. And if you write critically about India, you're seen as portraying it in a negative light - it also seems to be a popular way to present India, sort of mangoes and beggars.

I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.

I'm always in the kitchen, cooking and experimenting - I love it. And every now and then I think, 'I should write a cookbook' or, 'I should write for food magazines.' And then I get drawn back to writing fiction again.

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

We think of immigration as a Western issue but, of course, it isn't.