Karan Mahajan Quotes
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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 transaction. The customer doesn't tremble before complaining about how cold his food is.
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'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.
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Every time a blast happens, people ask, 'But why would someone do this?' Weirdly, it hasn't been answered well anywhere - neither in fiction nor non-fiction.
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In some ways, the best novel about terrorism, though it's not a novel, is 'The Looming Tower' by Lawrence Wright or 'Perfect Soldiers' by Terry McDermott.
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When I lived in Delhi, it was burdened with so many futures - fast roads, malls, flyovers - that one felt almost obliged to be hopeful. Now that hope has diminished, you can feel the city going into a frenzy to reinvent itself. I miss living there.
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Terrorists have goals beyond their supposed pacts with God. They are authors, too.
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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, howsoever obscure, to the mental work happening underneath.
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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 intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn't qualify as 'great literature.'
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If India hadn't become a troubled space for me, somehow I wouldn't have any reason to write about it. So the fact that it's a lost love, or something, is why I keep thinking about it obsessively.
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When I had worked on my first book, I had readily shown bits and pieces to everyone - for encouragement, to force myself to write.
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I think that a lot of terrorists have been middle class and, more surprisingly, many of them have been people who were not directly affected by the things they're angry about.
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Terrorists are as torn as anyone else.
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Apparently, the city of Delhi is a 'character' in my novels. I'd argue that it's a ... city... in my novels.
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When more Chinese started coming after the Gold Rush, employed on large projects like the Pacific Railroad, anti-Chinese sentiment became shrill.
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The deadpan brilliance of John McCrea has been underrepresented in music since 2004, when Cake served up 'Pressure Chief.'
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People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.
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Muslims remain the most convenient target for prejudice in a city like Delhi, which is far more ghettoized than Bombay or Bangalore, for example.
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The thing about a failure is that it is possible to deny it forever.
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I had a thick accent, and people didn't understand me, and I was ashamed, and I fumbled. I radiated an uncertain energy; sometimes baristas sensed this and wouldn't try to talk to me, and then an insecure voice in my head would cry, 'He's racist!'
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If Asian America exists, it is because of systemic racism.
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It's getting worse under Prime Minister Modi. The economic miracle has failed, to a degree, and people are reaching back to a kind of imagined Hindu past for a feeling of pride. And that feeling of pride necessarily comes from denying any kind of Muslim heritage. People my age seem to be becoming illiberal in a way that I'm surprised by.
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American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won't violate one another's privacies. This makes it a land of small talk.
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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.
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Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call.