Amitava Kumar

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. ”

Governance in India comes in the iron-clad armour of bureaucracy. Anyone in uniform considers it his or her right that we regard them as some sort of deity. ”

In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions. ”

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

In the early 1990s, my relatives in Patna, even those who had no interest in reading or writing, wanted Parker fountain pens. ”

Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world. ”

Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption. ”

I was seen as a traitor for marrying a Muslim - a Pakistani at that. ”

When we were getting married the Hindu way in Arrah, we had an old guest who asked my wife what her 'good name' was. I think she'd heard that I had married a Muslim. When my wife said, 'Mona Ahmed Ali,' the lady looked at me and exclaimed, 'Oh, so you've married a terrorist.' ”