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. ”