Amitava Kumar

I was pretty aimless as a youth, especially in Patna. I think reading saved me.

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

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

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.

A wonderful innovation of the Occupy Wall Street movement was the use of the human microphone - the name given to the body of the audience repeating, amplifying, each statement made by the speaker.

Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way.

Each employed immigrant has his or her place of work. It is only the taxi driver, forever moving on wheels, who occupies no fixed space. He represents the immigrant condition.

I should not romanticize the simplicity of a village. For instance, the place from where I used to buy a packet of glucose biscuits in my village is now selling cellphones.

In the U.S., the FBI or the people I met from the Department of Justice might be ignorant about Islam or about the East more generally, but I felt they were less willing to make blanket judgments about Muslims. This caution was less evident with some of the authorities I met in India.

When I close my eyes and think of a writer, I don't imagine him or her as someone who is sitting above me on a pedestal, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice in one hand! No, I see sentences.

I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me as a challenge, is the idea of doing strange things with what is real. Take what is real and make it more or less real.

To write what is not dead on the page, one has to be open to all kinds of disturbances and challenges and confusion.