Karan Mahajan Quotes
People are rushed and inspired by the success of Indian writers, and are falling over themselves to write novels. Every Indian is writing a novel right now. No one wants to revise.
I'm more interested than Philip Roth in understanding women, even if I do it imperfectly. But that book, Portnoy's Complaint, is literary punk in this way that is rare.
The problem of empathy is pretty universal, and pretty much breaks down across America. People can't feel beyond their drawn borders. And skin color and culture have a lot to do with that.
It's very good for us to say, as liberals, that we should be moved by everything, but the fact is that there's just so much competing for our attention.
How do you prevent attacks from becoming the very fabric of lived life in a city? Of course it's very easy to say you should be fearless and go about your daily life.
Of course I had a piece of luck I couldn't have imagine for myself in a million years: I got an agent. That sped up the process. I'd say it's a good idea, getting an agent.
The feeling I got from my research is that the victims of bombings end up becoming as alienated from the government as the terrorists who cause the attacks.
The West, in the form of American capitalism, is seen as having won, but people are beginning to offer alternatives again, sometimes in retrograde ways like radical Islam.
I also think that there's something about the graphic, political nature of such attacks, mixed with the fact that it all seems completely random to the victims.
For whatever reason, people know that car crashes can happen but they don't live with that fear every day when they're driving, or they're able to overcome it.
When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.
Most of the people in the audience were white and old. They had the gaunt look of people who have seen all the important movies and can now only look forward to reruns.
'This Is Not That Dawn' is remarkable in part for its careful and sensitive attention to women's lives - and also for its harsh critique of men and their failure to stop violence.
Artists, who are selfish people, become anxious around the self-sacrificing
Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present.
Like men who have failed together, they wanted nothing more than to never see each other again.
To ask a child to feel sympathy for the poor is harder than getting him to feel sympathy for a chicken or a goat—at least you can see a goat being slaughtered.
Every child is a packet of disappointments, hurts, dangers.
What if I've died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you're locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it?