Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I lived in Brooklyn from 2007 to 2012 but for the last few years have resided in Austin, Texas, where my world - especially the world of downtown - is predominantly white. "
Karan Mahajan
World
Brooklyn
Last
Related Quotes:
" American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won't violate one another's privacies. This makes it a land of small talk. "
Karan Mahajan
Life
Talk
American
" When I had worked on my first book, I had readily shown bits and pieces to everyone - for encouragement, to force myself to write. "
Karan Mahajan
Everyone
Book
Encouragement
" I think that a lot of terrorists have been middle class and, more surprisingly, many of them have been people who were not directly affected by the things they're angry about. "
Karan Mahajan
Angry
Class
Think
" If Asian America exists, it is because of systemic racism. "
Karan Mahajan
Exists
Racism
America
" When we talk about 9/11 and 26/11 - which is the shorthand for the Mumbai attacks in 2008 - we're talking about the most successful terrorist attacks in history. When you start trying to study the most successful event of its kind, it actually doesn't make for great fiction because there isn't the kind of failure in it that fiction thrives on. "
Karan Mahajan
History
Great
Start
" Apparently, the city of Delhi is a 'character' in my novels. I'd argue that it's a ... city... in my novels. "
Karan Mahajan
Character
Argue
Novels
" Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call. "
Karan Mahajan
Call
Reading
Standardized
" I remember returning to Bangalore after a few months of travel and seeing it as a first-world city, like New York or San Francisco. This may be obvious to some people, but I grew up in Delhi, and I had no experience of how someone from a 'Tier 2' city may view a 'Tier 1' city. You really do emigrate between worlds when you come from those towns. "
Karan Mahajan
Experience
People
Travel
" Cobain the writer is funny and self-aware and snotty with a knack for off-the-cuff profundity. Remarking to a friend that his band will be called 'Nirvana,' he scribbles next to it the words 'Oooh eerie mystical doom.' "
Karan Mahajan
Writer
Band
Friend
" As a Punjabi, you only have to look at your own family's past to find horror stories about arranged marriages and brutality. "
Karan Mahajan
Past
Family
Find
" In some ways, the best novel about terrorism, though it's not a novel, is 'The Looming Tower' by Lawrence Wright or 'Perfect Soldiers' by Terry McDermott. "
Karan Mahajan
Terrorism
Some
Soldiers
" The deadpan brilliance of John McCrea has been underrepresented in music since 2004, when Cake served up 'Pressure Chief.' "
Karan Mahajan
Brilliance
Up
Pressure
" It's getting worse under Prime Minister Modi. The economic miracle has failed, to a degree, and people are reaching back to a kind of imagined Hindu past for a feeling of pride. And that feeling of pride necessarily comes from denying any kind of Muslim heritage. People my age seem to be becoming illiberal in a way that I'm surprised by. "
Karan Mahajan
Age
Pride
People
" People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that. "
Karan Mahajan
Love
People
Talking
" There's a hustling, but also a self-centred vibe you can get from people in Delhi. "
Karan Mahajan
Hustling
Delhi
People
" There is not one New York but thousands - mixed-up conurbations and microclimates with their own internal logics and charms, dreams and juxtapositions, faces and tongues. "
Karan Mahajan
Faces
New
Own
" Asian-Americans are still regarded as 'other' by many of their fellow-citizens. "
Karan Mahajan
Many
Regarded
Other
" Literature has become too psychological. "
Karan Mahajan
Become
Too
Psychological
" The Hindu nationalists see a religion near perfection save for the tampering of Muslims and Christians. So they fall upon these groups, rather than try to reform their own practices by drawing on India's sophisticated philosophical traditions. "
Karan Mahajan
Drawing
Try
Religion
" In the five months I wrote the final draft of 'The Association of Small Bombs,' I never fell out of the book. The world was real to me: plausible and powerful. "
Karan Mahajan
World
Book
Me
" In Delhi, where I grew up, commerce is brusque. You don't ask each other how your day has been. You might not even smile. I'm not saying this is ideal - it's how it is. You're tied together by a transaction. The customer doesn't tremble before complaining about how cold his food is. "
Karan Mahajan
Food
You
Saying
" I had a thick accent, and people didn't understand me, and I was ashamed, and I fumbled. I radiated an uncertain energy; sometimes baristas sensed this and wouldn't try to talk to me, and then an insecure voice in my head would cry, 'He's racist!' "
Karan Mahajan
Talk
Energy
Voice
" Terrorists are people, too - they are given to error. Naipaul and then DeLillo do a good job in their novels of drawing this out: I'm thinking of DeLillo's contention in 'Mao II' that terrorists have replaced writers as the people who 'alter the inner-life of the culture.' I thought that was marvellous! "
Karan Mahajan
Culture
Good
Job
" The thing about a failure is that it is possible to deny it forever. "
Karan Mahajan
Failure
Deny
About
" If India hadn't become a troubled space for me, somehow I wouldn't have any reason to write about it. So the fact that it's a lost love, or something, is why I keep thinking about it obsessively. "
Karan Mahajan
Thinking
Space
Love
" To live in New York is to see the world as it is to come. "
Karan Mahajan
Live
World
See
" When I lived in Delhi, it was burdened with so many futures - fast roads, malls, flyovers - that one felt almost obliged to be hopeful. Now that hope has diminished, you can feel the city going into a frenzy to reinvent itself. I miss living there. "
Karan Mahajan
You
City
Feel
" Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus' worth of lyrics, and so there's a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn't qualify as 'great literature.' "
Karan Mahajan
Intelligence
Rock
Say
" We discount the physical, when, in fact, much of life is physical. People's personalities are partly formed by, or in response to, how they take up space; the physical mask has some relation, howsoever obscure, to the mental work happening underneath. "
Karan Mahajan
Mental
People
Space
" I met a number of young, striving, enterprising people in cities like Aligarh and Hubli. But the mental landscape of these towns is out of sync with their reality. Many of these towns are hellholes. "
Karan Mahajan
People
Young
Reality