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" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

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

Karan Mahajan

Target

" Literature has become too psychological. "

" The thing about a failure is that it is possible to deny it forever. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Terrorists have goals beyond their supposed pacts with God. They are authors, too. "

" 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. "

Karan Mahajan

Distance

Back

" I see flaws as a kind of beauty. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" American policies toward Asians reached a nadir in 1924, with the implementation of a law that sought 'to preserve the idea of American homogeneity' and denied admission to the country to most non-whites. Immigration from Asia was banned completely, with the establishment of an 'Asiatic Barred Zone.' "

" After a post-Bill Berry softening with albums like 'Up' and 'Reveal,' R.E.M. seems to be toughening up again; on the strength of the first single, 'Discoverer,' the band's new record looks to continue with the same muscular rock and roll that defined its last album, 'Accelerate.' "

" If Asian America exists, it is because of systemic racism. "

" 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? "

" Terrorists are as torn as anyone else. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

Karan Mahajan

Brilliance

Pressure

" I think people have turned terrorists into these larger-than-life devils and so are unable to write about them in the obvious way, which is as human, petty, bumbling. "

" 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. "

" New York City has no need to move on from 9/11 because, in a sense, it moved on days after, moments after. "

" Every time a blast happens, people ask, 'But why would someone do this?' Weirdly, it hasn't been answered well anywhere - neither in fiction nor non-fiction. "