Kiran Desai Quotes

Writing, for me, means humility. It’s a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you’re writing honestly.

The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.

A journey once begun, has no end

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?

I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.

I do think that the modern India does belong to writers who are living in India.

Sadness was so claustrophobic.

When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to.

This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several generations to have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time. How wonderful it was going to be to have things otherwise.

I feel as comfortable anywhere as I feel uncomfortable anywhere.

No fruit dies so vile and offensive a death as the banana.

You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes someone came popping around a corner again, or on the subway then they vanished again. Addresses, phone numbers did not hold. The emptiness Biju felt returned to him over and over, until eventually he made sure not to let friendships sink deep anymore.

She'd have to propel herself into the future by whatever means possible or she'd be trapped forever in a place whose times had already passed.

Slowly, painstakingly, like ants, men would make their paths and civilization and their wars once again, only to have it wash away again.

If you write a lovely story about India, you're criticized for selling an exotic version of India. And if you write critically about India, you're seen as portraying it in a negative light - it also seems to be a popular way to present India, sort of mangoes and beggars.

The Indian diaspora is a wonderful place to write from and I am lucky to be part of it.

We think of immigration as a Western issue but, of course, it isn't.

Jemu watched his father disappear. He didn't throw the coconut and he didn't cry. Never again would he know love for another human being that wasn't adulterated by another, contradictory emotion.

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?

Why couldn't she be part of that family? rent a room in someone else's life.

In India, if you are from the elite, dogs are extremely important. The breed of the dog indicates your wealth, that you are westernized. The cook, another human being, is on a much lower level than your dog. You see this all the time.

A man wasn't equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone harm. "We should be dying." the judge almost wept.

I'm always in the kitchen, cooking and experimenting - I love it. And every now and then I think, 'I should write a cookbook' or, 'I should write for food magazines.' And then I get drawn back to writing fiction again.