Akhil Sharma Quotes

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 it in fiction.

We are often unaware of how much we love the people around us. This is true for everyone. We may think that we love certain people, but we don't know how profoundly we love them.

It's easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don't want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.

I used to think my father had been assigned to us by the government.

I had been nervous about not doing well in college. During my first class, I looked at the notes the boy next to me was taking. His supply and demand curves seemed more neatly drawn than mine. Nearly everyone appeared to have gone to preparatory schools and already knew such odd things as the fact that there was no inflation during the Middle Ages. Very few, however, were willing to work the way I did.

When I would come out of Firestone Library at two in the morning, walk past the strange statues scattered around campus, and then sit at my desk in my room till the trees in the yard appeared out of the darkness, I felt that I was achieving something, that every hour I worked was generating almost physical value, as if I could touch the knowledge I was gaining through my work. One weekend, I came home to my parents and worked all Saturday night. In the morning, my mother saw me at my desk and brought me a glass of milk. Later, in Birju's room, she said to him, "Your brother can eat pain. He can sit all day at his desk and eat pain.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

I thought it was quite wonderful coming to America. I think immigration is a very difficult thing, but America is a very wonderful place.

Vanishing into books, I felt held.

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

I think immigrants, when they're stressed, think that there's something wrong with America, when it's really just difficult to leave a country and all that you know.

The little babies are missing their families from their past lives. The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies. The tears loosen their memories so they can slide away. They cry at the life they have lost, and then they cry at everything they'll forget.

'Family Life' is a blueprint of my life. It was horrible and physically gruesome in a way the book doesn't attempt to capture. It was emotionally very bleak.

I need to tell the things that are important but which don't make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.

I am shamelessly biased about the people in my life, and it makes sense to me that other people are the same.

I can't have composite characters. I can't attribute dialogue to someone based simply on my memory and not based on notes taken at the time that the words were spoken.

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 did success pass me by?'

Books were things not as complicated and unsatisfying as real life.

I know how to write fiction well.

I felt sad, happy, content.

We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.

It's a big world. A lot of people are worth loving. Why love someone mediocre?

We have to keep trusting God. We can't just trust God when he's doing what we want. We have to trust him even when things are not as we would like them.

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 reader.

After four or five months of reading Hemingway, I decided to write a story. I had in the past written stories for English classes. These had all been about white people, because white people's stories seemed to matter more. Also, I hadn't known how to write about Indians. How would I translate the various family relations, the difference between an uncle who is a father's brother and an uncle who is a mother's brother? Having read Hemingway, I knew that I should just push all the exotic things to the side as if they didn't matter, that this was how one used exoticism - by not bothering to explain.

The first story I wrote was about my brother coughing. I woke one night to the sound of Birju coughing downstairs and then could not go back to sleep. To be woken this way and not be able to return to sleep struck me as sad enough to merit a reader's attention. Also, Hemingway had written a story about a man being woken because somebody is dying nearby, and the man is forced to witness the death.

I got up from my bed and turned on the light. I then returned to bed with a spiral-bound notebook and placed it against my knees. I began my story in the middle of the action the way Hemingway did. I wrote:

The coughing wakes me. My wife coughs and coughs, and then when her throat is clear, she moans. The nurse's aide moves back and forth downstairs. The hospital bed jingles.

I wrote that it was a spouse coughing because that seemed something a re

I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir.

An elderly black man with gray hair said, "Every bottle should come with a warning: 'This bottle may cause you to lose your job. This bottle may cause you to get a divorce. This bottle may cause you to become homeless.

Intern will resonate not only with doctors, but with anyone who has struggled with the grand question 'What should I do with my life?' In a voice of profound honesty and intelligence, Sandeep Jauhar gives us an insider's look at the medical profession and also a dramatic account of the psychological challenges of early adulthood.

I think that books are fundamentally educational.

During my breakdown, many things, tiny things I had not even registered before, had begun to torment me with guilt. I used to steal Splenda from Starbucks. I would go into a Starbucks whenever I needed the sweetener and would take a fistful of packets, even when I didn't buy a coffee.

My parents are deeply pious Hindus.