Literary Birthday – 17 March – Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar Quotes

1. Imagination makes us shape better stories, sure, but it also allows us to multiply possibilities.
2. The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.
3. It is clear from Salman Rushdie‘s writing that politics and literature cannot be separated. Everything is political.
4. Criticism is, or ought to be, a judicious act.
5. No civilisation has a monopoly on tolerance; each is capable of bigotry.
6. Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes. All his books were odd, all of them ‘unfinished’ the way Chopin’s Études are unfinished: no wasted gestures, no unnecessary notes. (via)

Read: Amitava Kumar’s 10 Rules For Writing

Amitava Kumar is an Indian writer and journalist. Kumar’s writing has appeared in many publications including Harper’s, Vanity Fair, The Hindu, and other publications in North America and India. Kumar is the author of several works of non-fiction and four novels. He is the author of Nobody Does the Right Thing, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, and Husband of a Fanatic. His non-fiction books include The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal and Every Day I Write the Book. His novel Immigrant, Montana was on President Obama’s list of favorite books of 2018. His new novel is My Beloved Life. Kumar has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and he is currently a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. He is professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College. Follow him on Instagram.

Quotes / Photo credit Don J. Usner/ Source for photograph

 by Amanda Patterson

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