“I can’t have composite characters. I can’t attribute dialogue to someone based simply on my memory and not based on notes taken at the time that the words were spoken.”

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,

The best scientists and explorers have the attributes of kids! They ask question and have a sense of wonder.

Create unselfishness as the most important team attribute.

I don’t think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.

You have to reduce the essence of your brand to a single thought or attribute.

Only brand names register in the mind… What you should generally do is take a regular word and use it out of context to connote the primary attribute of your brand.

An attribute that nobody else already owns in your category.

When people hear about teenage parents and teenage pregnancy, they attribute a lot of personality traits to those individuals, which is just such a bizarre thing when you really think about it.