Quotes from Kiran Desai

I do think that the modern India does belong to writers who are living in India.

Writing, for me, means humility. It's a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you're writing honestly.

In India, if you are from the elite, dogs are extremely important. The breed of the dog indicates your wealth, that you are westernized. The cook, another human being, is on a much lower level than your dog. You see this all the time.

We think of immigration as a Western issue but, of course, it isn't.

When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to.

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

Why couldn't she be part of that family? rent a room in someone else's life.

The Indian diaspora is a wonderful place to write from, and I am lucky to be part of it.

The publishing world is very timid. Readers are much braver.

New York is a lovely city. It is an easy city to go back to and an easy city to leave. Every time I go there I immediately make travel plans.

Jemu watched his father disappear. He didn't throw the coconut and he didn't cry. Never again would he know love for another human being that wasn't adulterated by another, contradictory emotion.

She'd have to propel herself into the future by whatever means possible or she'd be trapped forever in a place whose times had already passed.

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

Year by year, his life wasn't amounting to anything at all...And yet, another part of him had expanded: his self-consciousness, his self-pity -- oh, the tediousness of it...Shouldn't he return to a life where he might slice his own importance, to where he might relinquish this overrated control over his own destiny and perhaps be subtracted from its determination altogether? He might even experience that greatest luxury of not noticing himself at all.

No fruit dies so vile and offensive a death as the banana...

Don't be scared, puppy dog, little frog, little duck, duckie dog. It's just rain.

it was just fate in the way fate has of providing the destitute with a greater quota of accidents for which nobody can be blamed.

Should humans conquer the mountain or should they wish for the mountain to possess them?

The cow was not an Indian cow; therefore it was not holy?

The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow.

That very afternoon the police arrived at Cho Oyu in a line of toad-colored jeeps that appeared through the moving static of a small anxious sleet. They left their opened umbrellas in a row on the veranda, but the wind undid them and they began to wheel about - mostly black ones that leaked a black dye, but also a pink, synthetic made-in-Taiwan one, abloom with flowers.

The five peaks of Kanchenjunga turned golden with the kind of luminous light that made you feel, if briefly, that truth was apparent. All you needed to do was to reach out and pluck it.

She had been mistaken - she was only the center to herself, as always, and a small player playing her part in someone else's story.

How many lived in the fake versions of their countries, in fake versions of other people's countries? Did their lives feel as unreal to them as his own did to him?