I think it's really good not to get published. It sounds crazy but it's true. People want to get published very soon, but the moment that happens, you lose a bit of your originality. Once you publish, you are always doing things made-to-order. You stop being a weaver and become a tailor. You are tailoring things to suit other people's fashion.

The only way one can display learning is by playing with it. Because the truth is that there's something embarrassing about displaying heavy knowledge. You feel sort of annoying.

What fiction does is bring you closer to the essence of truth, as opposed to simply giving you the truth. And there's no knowing truth. Truth seekers are all charlatans. You can only feel the truth of something.

India has sanctioned phenomenal injustices for years and years and years. And normalized it. There is no understanding of what it means to be born into a class that has been denied basic human dignity for generations and generations.

Everything you draw is influenced. It's like yogurt. You need a little bit to start the next batch.

Only a very specific kind of writer keeps their reader in mind while working. Such writers don't want to irk their readers; they don't want to challenge their readers; they want to produce exactly what their reader expects them to produce. I'm not like that.

My books serve as archives of thoughts and emotions, like a tonal history that captures how I felt at a certain time of my life. It's not very informational. You're not going to get comprehensive knowledge about the Han dynasty of China or about India's Emergency. But you might learn how one person felt about the Los Angeles Olympics.