“As a teacher, I can help my students see what is working and not working. I can show them certain solutions.”

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

To me exposition always contains tenderness.

I need to tell the things that are important but which don’t make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.

There are also so many emotional aspects to money – feelings of inadequacy, feelings of security. I am not sure if there needs to be more about money in fiction, but the absence of this aspect can make a story feel somehow frictionless and unreal.

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

Even within my stories, people hold opposing views.

Certainly the details of our life are unique. Spending time thinking of how I am different from someone else, however, does not tend to be very productive.

The tears loosen their memories so they can slide away. They cry at the life they have lost, and then they cry at everything they’ll forget.

I realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind.

Also, I have to assume that readers are sophisticated enough to know that not every person in a community is the same, and so there are many people who would not force an abortion just because a fetus is female.

It’s easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don’t want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.

As a human being living one’s life, one is more open to relief when there is rain or the expectation of rain. That readiness for hope gets manifested in my stories and that of many other Indian writers.

My parents are deeply pious Hindus.

It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.

Intern will resonate not only with doctors, but with anyone who has struggled with the grand question ‘What should I do with my life?’ In a voice of profound honesty and intelligence,

When they do something stupid, they don’t do it again. And when they do something that works a little bit, they do it even better and harder the next time.

I actually started working on Madagascar before my daughter was born.

She and I had come close to working on two other films together prior to this one that unfortunately had fallen apart for various reasons.

I have a lot of intention behind what I put out there. The reason all this stuff I do works together, the environmental and social, collaborating with ballet companies to score a show, the bike tour – all of that stuff comes together through community building with music.

I was coming into a situation I didn’t really know much about, and now, after a couple of years, the character’s kind of mellowed and gotten comfortable working at the command center and very comfortable with his troops.

If your focus is there, then the actual doing of the job will be fun and enjoyable. But if you’re so involved in trying to be interesting and a character and everything when you’re not working, it can get in the way and people get goofed up.

When I started understanding how science works, it occurred to me that there just is no evidence that there is a God.

I can’t imagine working without and audience.