If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.
Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.
If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.
When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.
But thing in the past are like plate that’s shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?
At the same time that 'I' am the content of a relation, 'I' am also that which does the relating.
Entertainment history is now the main source of supposedly historical knowledge for more and more people, but 'histo-tainment' is superficial and lacks all context.
A western audience might not appreciate 'Chanakya's Chant' because of its dependence on history and ancient statecraft. My book is a modern-day thriller that draws on a bedrock of history. My primary object is to entertain, not educate.
I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.
Let us see whether it is the New Order or me who will be the loser before Indonesian history. I have won. The New Order has fallen and my writings have been translated into 40 languages.
Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more import...
I have a pretty good knowledge of the Indian world by virtue of living on several different reservations and being exposed to several different cultures and languages.
When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.
It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.
I don't want to turn 50 and say, 'Gosh, I wish I'd lived in that part of the world for a time. I wish I'd read that book by Faulkner.' I want time to delve back into Thoreau and Kafka.
Pam: Sex with you is really a Kafka-esque experience. Alvy Singer: Oh. Thank you. Pam: I mean that as a compliment.
But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.
I have always been a bit of an introvert. In fact, my dad used to force me to meet people so that my interpersonal skills improve. As an individual, I was happiest when left alone.
Scholarship was one thing, drudgery another. I very soon concluded that nothing would induce me to read, let alone make notes on, hundreds and hundreds of very, very, very boring books.
