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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" Yashpal, writing in the nineteen-fifties, sought to indict this culture of men, Hindus and Muslims alike, who value their freedom and power over the rights and lives of women. "

" I put my thoughts in a book, which must mean I don't want anyone to read them. "

" When a certain swathe of India's population considers the country's ancient past, it doesn't see a country fragmented into kingdoms, savaged by caste divisions, and mired in poverty; rather, what's envisioned is a vast, unified Hindu empire stretching from Kashmir to the Indian tip at Kanyakumari. "

" 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. "

" To live in New York is to see the world as it is to come. "

" Apparently, the city of Delhi is a 'character' in my novels. I'd argue that it's a ... city... in my novels. "

" 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. "

" Literature has become too psychological. "

" The deadpan brilliance of John McCrea has been underrepresented in music since 2004, when Cake served up 'Pressure Chief.' "

" When more Chinese started coming after the Gold Rush, employed on large projects like the Pacific Railroad, anti-Chinese sentiment became shrill. "

" 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! "

" 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. "

" There's a hustling, but also a self-centred vibe you can get from people in Delhi. "

" 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.' "

" I immigrated to the United States in 2001 for college. "

" I tend to see my characters from inside and outside at once; this is a technique I use to retain a slight distance. It means my characters can act in unexpected ways on two axes: physical and mental. It isn't just, 'I thought this and then I did this,' which is the technique of the modern psychological novel. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" As a Punjabi, you only have to look at your own family's past to find horror stories about arranged marriages and brutality. "

" By 2013, at the age of 29, I was failing. I had left two good jobs in succession to complete a novel I'd been tooling around with since 2009, had enrolled in a graduate programme in Texas, as far away from home as possible, to finish it - and yet: what did I have to show for it after five years of work? "

" Muslims remain the most convenient target for prejudice in a city like Delhi, which is far more ghettoized than Bombay or Bangalore, for example. "

" Getting some distance allowed me to develop a hunger for India and to come back and explore it in a way I wouldn't have had I been living here. And that probably made me more political as well. "

" Terrorists are as torn as anyone else. "

" When I had worked on my first book, I had readily shown bits and pieces to everyone - for encouragement, to force myself to write. "

" Asian-Americans are still regarded as 'other' by many of their fellow-citizens. "

" 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.' "

" I travelled around small-town India a lot for a job from 2010-2012, and I was impressed by the energy I encountered in these places. "

" Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call. "

" When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers. "