21 quotes found
Novelist · American
American novelist
“The roots of shame run deep.”
“No action is safe from meaning.”
“Silence is the small mans only defense.”
“Silence is the small man’s only defense.”
“Every child is a packet of disappointments, hurts, dangers.”
“The thing about a failure is that it is possible to deny it forever.”
“And you know what happens when a bomb goes off? The truth about people comes out. Men leave their children and run away. Shopkeepers push aside wives and try to save their cash. People come and loo...”
“Most of the people in the audience were white and old. They had the gaunt look of people who have seen all the important movies and can now only look forward to reruns.”
“What if I've died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you're locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it?”
“To ask a child to feel sympathy for the poor is harder than getting him to feel sympathy for a chicken or a goatat least you can see a goat being slaughtered.”
“Like men who have failed together, they wanted nothing more than to never see each other again.”
“Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present.”
“During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalismand of American...”
“When we talk about 9/11 and 26/11 - which is the shorthand for the Mumbai attacks in 2008 - we're talking about the most successful terrorist attacks in history. When you start trying to study the ...”
“'This Is Not That Dawn' is remarkable in part for its careful and sensitive attention to women's lives - and also for its harsh critique of men and their failure to stop violence.”
“We discount the physical, when, in fact, much of life is physical. People's personalities are partly formed by, or in response to, how they take up space; the physical mask has some relation, howso...”
“When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.”
“Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus' worth of lyrics, and so there's a real pleasure in accessing the intelligen...”
“I remember returning to Bangalore after a few months of travel and seeing it as a first-world city, like New York or San Francisco. This may be obvious to some people, but I grew up in Delhi, and I...”
“In Delhi, where I grew up, commerce is brusque. You don't ask each other how your day has been. You might not even smile. I'm not saying this is ideal - it's how it is. You're tied together by a tr...”
“Artists, who are selfish people, become anxious around the self-sacrificing”
