Amitava Kumar

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

I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny.

My own personal conviction is that if I were writing without thinking about how images or how journalism is creating a world for us, I would not be happy about it.

In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything, and that is the attraction of writing fiction.

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

My past makes me an insider, but my profession makes me an outsider. A writer always stands outside to report on reality.

Hindi writing, as well as Hindi journalism, is a great gift to Indian writing.

I have to tell you, when I hear the song 'Jiya ho Bihar ke Lala,' I want to throw the history books out of the window and dance!

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

Indian writers in English are rank individualists. Even among the progressives, there is a strain of anti-leftism, or at least a suspicion of any organized politics.

In the way in which we are living in a much more explosive and more tension-filled society, a society that is driven with more and more contradictions, it is but unavoidable that some of this will also come into cinema. I would, in fact, argue that a part of it is borrowed from Hollywood. It's as if Quentin Tarantino has come to Mumbai.

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

For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance.

A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie's novel 'Fury' earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at the college where I teach, and who had invited Rushdie to come speak, that he wouldn't share the stage with me.

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

Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities.

The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.

It is clear from Salman Rushdie's writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political.

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.

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