Writer Quotes

For years I wrote in my basement. More recently I graduated to one floor above, an office with all my books and music and - ta da! - a window.

For as spiritual as some people think my books are, I've never really dealt with religious things.

Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.

Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what's interesting to you isn't necessarily interesting to a reader.

A memoir should have some uplifting quality, inspiring or illuminating, and that's what separates a life story that can influence other people.

You're not a wave, you're a part of the ocean.

You have to work at creating your own culture.

You have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.

Nobody's favorite movie is some dark, dysfunctional slasher story. Everybody's favorite song is a sentimental song. So why all of a sudden is it bad to be sentimental in books?

My own father didn't talk a lot about feelings or emotions.

If you really could fit God in a file, you wouldn't need to believe in God, you know, you'd just go get the file like a box of corn flakes off the shelf.

I seem to have very few casual readers, only passionate and appreciative ones.

We all have two things in common, no matter who we are: We were born and we are going to die.

I used to be a classic workaholic, and after seeing how little work and career really mean when you reach the end of your life, I put a new emphasis on things I believe count more. These things include: family, friends, being part of a community, and appreciating the little joys of the average day.

The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

Mortality means you don't have forever to work things out. You can live your life unexamined but then on the last day you're going to think: 'I've left things a little late.'

Detroit is a place where we've had it pretty tough. But there is a generosity here and a well of kindness that goes deep.

I believe that you live on inside the hearts and minds of everyone you've touched while you were here on earth.

For better or for worse, I've watched people die in front of me. I see how they are in the end. And they're not cynical. In the end, they wanna hold somebody's hand. And that's real to me.

We all lose somebody we care about and want to find some comforting way of dealing with it, something that will give us a little closure, a little peace.

I believe the biggest themes of life are put into the best focus when held up against the very sharp light of mortality.

People are only mean when they're threatened, and that's what our culture does. That's what our economy does.

If you're always battling against getting older, you're always going to be unhappy, because it's going to happen anyhow.

When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them.

When I was growing up in the south Indian city of Madras, there were only two political parties that mattered; one was run by a former matinee idol, and the other was run by his former screenwriter.

Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.

Nothing gives us greater pride than the importance of India's scientific and engineering colleges, or the army of Indian scientists at organizations such as Microsoft and NASA. Our temples are not the god-encrusted shrines of Varanasi, but Western scientific institutions like Caltech and MIT, and ma

Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country.

Like most people who live in India, I complain about corruption, but know that I can live with corrupt men. It is the honest ones I secretly worry about.

Like most of my friends in school, I was a member of multiple circulating libraries; and all of us, to begin with, borrowed and read the same things.