I tend to think that we are all pretty much alike. We all feel despair. We all have problems with relationships. We all become afraid. We all look at…

- Akhil Sharma

It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the…

- Akhil Sharma

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and …

- Akhil Sharma

People often need to describe things quickly and so they use a shorthand. The problem is that after they use a label, they begin to think only in ter…

- Akhil Sharma

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

- Akhil Sharma

Ernest Hemingway has been the most important influence on me as a writer. But at a certain point as a writer, I realized that he was writing about go…

- Akhil Sharma

When someone gets a success, and we, too, have done good work and sometimes even better work than the person who has just triumphed, we wonder: Why d…

- Akhil Sharma

Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn't. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to…

- Akhil Sharma

To me exposition always contains tenderness. While a dramatized scene is a way of proving and guaranteeing an emotional experience for the reader, ex…

- Akhil Sharma