Amitava Kumar

India's nuclear-test blasts have pretty much put to rest the myth of Indians being peace-loving Gandhians. ”

Most writers censor themselves in awful ways. I do, too. ”

I have long held that many of the writers and artists working in the aftermath of 9/11 have presented a faux familiarity with the so-called terrorist mind. ”

While I ridicule books of self-help, I'm also quite susceptible to them. They help simplify things. ”

I like listening to Garrison Keillor's 'The Writer's Almanac' with my daughter. ”

Much of what we regard as truth in the war on terror is actually rather suspect. ”

What is said by the person holding a megaphone inciting a crowd, or what is said by someone who incites a rumour? And what is the difference between that person and me, sitting in my room imagining something, telling a story? ”

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. ”

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. ”

We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps, but in the differences that thrive behind settled, more clear-cut divisions. ”