She has the gift of accepting her life.
She is stunned that in this town there are no sidewalks to speak of, no streetlights, no public transportation, no stores for miles at at a time.
The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold.
It’s easy to set a story anywhere if you get a good guidebook and get some basic street names, and some descriptions, but, for me, yes, I am indebted to my travels to India for several of the stories.
It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.
I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.
In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, ‘Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?’ I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.
I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for ‘The Namesake,’ I felt that it had to be a novel – it couldn’t work as a story.
With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before.
The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.
When I sit down to write, I don’t think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.
If I stop to think about fans, or best-selling, or not best-selling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It’s like staring at the mirror all day.
She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.
On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani refugees had fled, seeking safety over the Indian border.
I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression.
I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device – recording and projecting.
Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.
I’ve seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn’t occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don’t feel like going back and dredging them up.
And wasn’t it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn’t it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one’s life with, after making a family with that person, even in spite of missing that person... that solitude was what one relished the most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?
The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.