I am very interested in human-interest stories emerging from modern India. I get my inspiration and daily dose by reading the 'Hindustan Times.'
People don't just want a mindless flick with a superstar; they want to connect more deeply.
I want to show that the underdog can win. I believe we're all the same: you, a slum girl, my mother.
I became completely addicted to 'Angry Birds' for a while.
I write fast. But it takes me a while to get going. It's very important for me to see my whole plot. I have to see the end first because I like a surprise in the end. Which is why I let characters and plot gestate in my mind.
Indian writers have appropriated English as an Indian language, and that gives a certain freshness to the way we write.
My books may highlight corruption, brutality and venality, but they also show that if these things come to light, there is rectification. The voiceless do have a voice; democratic mechanisms and accountability do exist.
I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.
The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!
I need my natural laziness to be counteracted by obsession in order to do anything.
Realism hasn't fallen out of favor with most people, who are interested in people's lives rather than gymnastics of style or literary trends. It's a certain kind of academic who undervalues realism, largely because it is not amenable to endless exege...
Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.
Basically, my mother couldn't hold a tune and when I was a baby, a rather tactless baby, I would ask her not to sing... you can't get to sleep if someone is singing off key nearby.
Dear though the reader might be, I'd be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.
In spite of all temptations of belonging to many nations, I've remained an Indian.
So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
I know from an editor's point of view or a publisher's point of view it's easier to slot me into a particular niche. But I know that I'd be bored unless I wrote a book that in some senses was a challenge.
Too many trees are killed to print the words of people who may not have all that much to say, and authors and journalists are equally culpable in this regard.
If you were to ask me to pick my favourite author, well, there are so many of them, I'd really just have to say the first names that came to mind, and I'm sure that I'll later think 'Oh, I should have mentioned that one.'
The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.
My grandparents told endless stories about the town they were from. It became an almost mythic place.
