“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.”

We all become afraid. We all look at others and think these other people are more fortunate than us.

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.

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?

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.

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.

It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.

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.

The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies.

As a teacher, I can help my students see what is working and not working. I can show them certain solutions.

I tend to think that we are all pretty much alike. We all feel despair. We all have problems with relationships.

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

To me exposition always contains tenderness.

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.

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.

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

Even within my stories, people hold opposing views.

Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what’s beautiful, and it’s best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.

You can’t describe the feeling of being in love – when you meet someone who makes you a better person.

I can’t really describe my sound.

Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.

Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

I was once described by one of my critics as an aesthetic fascist.