I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.

In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did, has three daughters, no sons, is supposed to go and hang herself, kill herself, because it is such an unlucky kind of motherhood to have.

My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just continuous overload.

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 the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.

Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one's individuality.

Dullness is a kind of luxury.