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.
AKHIL SHARMAExposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.
More Akhil Sharma Quotes
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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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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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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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For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.
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To me exposition always contains tenderness.
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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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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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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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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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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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Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?
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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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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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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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The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies.
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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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Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind.
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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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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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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 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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Even within my stories, people hold opposing views.
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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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It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.
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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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Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.
AKHIL SHARMA