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" 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. "

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" Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet. "

Amitava Kumar

Fault

Matter

Meet

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes and cinema houses, village squares, and half-forgotten libraries. "

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

Amitava Kumar

Always

Past

" 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. "

" The lives of the young are so tumultuous. "

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

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

" I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning. "

" Muslim anger has, of course, been stoked by America's war in Iraq and by Israel's brutal policies toward Palestine and Lebanon. "

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

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

" A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general rule, it holds true. "

" Such is the impurity of our enterprise, as writers or as critics, that even in the act of proclaiming our freedom from the demands of authenticity, we are never free from brandishing it. "

" Even fake news tries to convince us of its reality, but it does so mostly by appealing to your preconceived notions, your shared biases, or your prejudice. How to do the opposite? To create a sense of the real and then challenge your biases. I think that is my favourite aspect of writing, and that is what I've tried to do in 'The Lovers.' "

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

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

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

Amitava Kumar

Better

Imagination

" 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. "

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

" 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! "