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" 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. "

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" 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

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

Karan Mahajan

Started

Railroad

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Literature has become too psychological. "

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

" I think there is a chance that Indian writers in America will start producing very interesting books in the years to come. "

" I see flaws as a kind of beauty. "

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

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "