Ernest Hemingway has been the most important influence on me as a writer. But at a certain point as a writer,
AKHIL SHARMAThe 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.
More Akhil Sharma Quotes
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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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The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies.
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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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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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We all become afraid. We all look at others and think these other people are more fortunate than us.
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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.
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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.
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For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.
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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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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.
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The monsoon is such a dominant part of Indian life that it is hard to overstate its importance.
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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.
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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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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.
AKHIL SHARMA