For me, a lot of the humor comes not from innocence but from characters trying to figure out how to get what they need. I don’t try to be funny, but am relieved when an opportunity comes up for humor.
AKHIL SHARMAAlso, 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.
More Akhil Sharma Quotes
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If anybody reads an Indian newspaper, all these things are obvious, and so I am not breaking news. All I am doing is representing my community as it actually is.
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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.
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Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?
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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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We all become afraid. We all look at others and think these other people are more fortunate than us.
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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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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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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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The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies.
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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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It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.
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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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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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The little babies are missing their families from their past lives.
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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.
AKHIL SHARMA