Explore Quotes by Kiran Desai

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

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.

New York is a lovely city. It is an easy city to go back to and an easy city to leave. Every time I go there I immediately make travel plans.

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.

I feel as comfortable anywhere as I feel uncomfortable anywhere.

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

The publishing world is very timid. Readers are much braver.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?

All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths.

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

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.

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

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.