Hari Kunzru Famous Quotes
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There's an explosion of Indian fiction of all kinds, from military thrillers to chicklit. I think that's exciting.
Critchley and Webster's fierce, witty exploration of Hamlet makes most other writing about Shakespeare seem simpleminded.
I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium.
Intellectuals who live in Hungary, or who wish to work or lecture there, are extremely circumspect in their criticism.
Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama's election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening.
On your record deck, you played the sound of the middle passage, the blackest sound. You wanted the suffering you didn't have, the authority you thought it would bring. It scared you, but you thought of the swagger it would put in your walk, the admiring glances of your friends. Then came the terror when real darkness first seeped through the walls of your bedroom, the walls designed to keep you safe and dreaming. And finally your rising sense of shame when you admitted to yourself that you were relieved the walls were there. The shame of knowing that you would do nothing, that you would allow it all to carry on.
Legality is just the name for everything that's not dangerous for the ruling order.
I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love.
There are things about our world that almost by their nature defy our ability to comprehend them. Some people use a religious register to deal with that - they call it God and that's a way of domesticating it.
As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold.
Driving was almost the only thing that felt natural in America. It was traditional. It was patriotic. When you accelerated, you could almost hear the crowd cheering you on.
All things are transitory. All things must pass. Attachments whether to material possessions, to people, to places to name, are futile. Despite your clinging, these things will fade away.
She thought she was a feminist. She was only bad tempered.
I think it's important for all culturally literate people to understand the technological substrate of new developments.
But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been.
There's nothing New York likes more than a thing. Or a place. Or a place that's a thing. Or a thing that happens to be a place.
He had the polite yet aggressive air of a man who enjoys competitive racket sports.
These days Gaby was hearing that voice again, the one that told her to get out, to smash up all the emotional chairs and tables so there would be no going back, so she could tear down this version of herself and start again.
In my early teens, science fiction and fantasy had an almost-total hold over my imagination. Their outcast status was part of their appeal.
I suffer from vertigo. It's paralyzing in extreme situations. The most scared I've been as an adult was trying to conquer that fear by going climbing in Wales.
There was, as she put it, nothing to stop me. So I followed the path of educated misfits through the ages and got a job in a bookshop.
When I try to understand somebody, create a character, I fall into them. When I think writers are telling me what to think, I get harrumphy.
Some books I've kept because the binding is beautiful - I'm unlikely ever to read my grandmother's copy of 'The Life of Lord Nelson.' I'm addicted to secondhand bookshops.
I realized I had a novel on my hands, but didn't know where it was going to go. So I thought, 'I'm going to do everything that you're not supposed to do when you plan a novel; I'm going to step back and let this thing take itself wherever it wants to go, and I'm not going to worry about how things connect until later on.'
What if one were to want to hunt for these hidden presences? You can't just rummage around like you're at a yard sale. You have to listen. You have to pay attention. There are certain things you can't look at directly. You need to trick them into revealing themselves. That's what we're doing with Walter, Jaz. We're juxtaposing things, listening for echoes. It's not some silly cybernetic dream of command and control, modeling the whole world so you can predict the outcome. It's certainly not a theory of everything. I don't have a theory of any kind. What I have is far more profound.'
'What's that?'
'A sense of humor.'
Jaz looked at him, trying to find a clue in his gaunt face, in the clear gray eyes watching him with such - what? Amusement? Condescension? There was something about the man which brought on a sort of hermeneutic despair. He was a forest of signs.
'We're hunting for jokes.' Bachman spoke slowly, as if to a child. 'Parapraxes. Cosmic slips of the tongue. They're the key to the locked door. They'll help us discover it.'
'Discover what?'
'The face of God. What else would we be looking for?
In good novelistic fashion, the discovery I've made is that it's complicated. I think that's one of good things about exploring these questions in a non-polemic, fictional way: you get to feel out territory rather than take positions. Through writing this, I can understand the impulse to faith, how people make meaning, how people make community, without having to say, do this, don't do that, or I believe, I don't believe.
I stand on my public record as a defender of the human rights of Muslims, notably my work for Moazzam Begg and other British Muslims detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay.
I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit.
People always look aroused when they're acting violently.
I can see a version of my life where it all becomes meaningless. On a good day, writing seems noble. Other times, it's narcissistic and pointless.
There are still some terrible cliches in the presentation of Indian fiction. The lotus flower. The hennaed hands. In mainland Europe, people still slap these images on my books and I go bananas.
Electricity is not digital. It does not come in discrete packets, but floods the air and flows through conductors and shoots from the hands of mad scientists in silent movies. If it is futuristic at all, it is a past version of the future, temperamental, unstable, half-alive.