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 SHARMAAs a teacher, I can help my students see what is working and not working. I can show them certain solutions.
More Akhil Sharma Quotes
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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.
AKHIL SHARMA -
I tend to think that we are all pretty much alike. We all feel despair. We all have problems with relationships.
AKHIL SHARMA -
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 SHARMA -
Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.
AKHIL SHARMA -
Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?
AKHIL SHARMA -
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.
AKHIL SHARMA -
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 SHARMA -
To me exposition always contains tenderness.
AKHIL SHARMA -
Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind.
AKHIL SHARMA -
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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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.
AKHIL SHARMA -
The monsoon is such a dominant part of Indian life that it is hard to overstate its importance.
AKHIL SHARMA -
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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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.
AKHIL SHARMA -
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.
AKHIL SHARMA