There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer,…

- Bharati Mukherjee

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

- Bharati Mukherjee

The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.

- Bharati Mukherjee

You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City from Calcutta that suddenly I could be a new pe…

- Bharati Mukherjee

I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contempor…

- Bharati Mukherjee

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

- Bharati Mukherjee

I have to put down roots where I decide to stay. It wasn't enough for me to be an expatriate Indian in Canada. If I can't feel that I can make social…

- Bharati Mukherjee

I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver t…

- Bharati Mukherjee

What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?

- Bharati Mukherjee