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.
AKHIL SHARMASandeep Jauhar gives us an insider’s look at the medical profession and also a dramatic account of the psychological challenges of early adulthood.
More Akhil Sharma Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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We all become afraid. We all look at others and think these other people are more fortunate than us.
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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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My parents are deeply pious Hindus.
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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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Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?
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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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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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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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The little babies are missing their families from their past lives.
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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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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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The monsoon is such a dominant part of Indian life that it is hard to overstate its importance.
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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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The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies.
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Even within my stories, people hold opposing views.
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I can guide them to books that will serve as role models. Largely, though, one learns to write almost like developing muscle memory, and this requires years of effort.
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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.
AKHIL SHARMA