For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.
AKHIL SHARMACertainly 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.
More Akhil Sharma Quotes
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As a teacher, I can help my students see what is working and not working. I can show them certain solutions.
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People often need to describe things quickly and so they use a shorthand. The problem is that after they use a label, they begin to think only in terms of the label instead of the totality of the experience a novel provides.
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Even within my stories, people hold opposing views.
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The little babies are missing their families from their past lives.
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We all become afraid. We all look at others and think these other people are more fortunate than us.
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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.
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To me exposition always contains tenderness.
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Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn’t. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.
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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.
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When someone gets a success, and we, too, have done good work and sometimes even better work than the person who has just triumphed, we wonder: Why did success pass me by?
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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.
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It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.
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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.
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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.
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Money is part of how we move through the world, what stores and restaurants we go into, whether we take a train to the airport or a taxi. Describing characters living in the real world requires describing them engaging with money.
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Ernest Hemingway has been the most important influence on me as a writer. But at a certain point as a writer,
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The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies.
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My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.
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One’s life completely changes based on the rain. After the monsoon, because the dust settles, one can see further and so it feels like one’s eyesight has improved or that one is living in a different country where there is more light.
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While a dramatized scene is a way of proving and guaranteeing an emotional experience for the reader, exposition assumes that the reader is sophisticated and can see the universal.
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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,
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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.
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I tend to think that we are all pretty much alike. We all feel despair. We all have problems with relationships.
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I can guide them to books that will serve as role models. Largely, though, one learns to write almost like developing muscle memory, and this requires years of effort.
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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.
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Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?
AKHIL SHARMA