Hari Kunzru

I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium. ”

There's an explosion of Indian fiction of all kinds, from military thrillers to chicklit. I think that's exciting. ”

Say there are three identical-looking pizza joints on a street. Two of those will always be empty. The third will have a line of people patiently waiting, checking their phones. There's always one place that's the place. That's how it works. ”

There's nothing New York likes more than a thing. Or a place. Or a place that's a thing. Or a thing that happens to be a place. ”

I stand on my public record as a defender of the human rights of Muslims, notably my work for Moazzam Begg and other British Muslims detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay. ”

As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold. ”

I realized I had a novel on my hands, but didn't know where it was going to go. So I thought, 'I'm going to do everything that you're not supposed to do when you plan a novel; I'm going to step back and let this thing take itself wherever it wants to go, and I'm not going to worry about how things connect until later on.' ”

Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama's election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening. ”

I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love. ”

But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been. ”