Karan Mahajan Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Karan Mahajan:

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.

We discount the physical, when, in fact, much of life is physical. People's personalities are partly formed by, or in response to, how they take up space; the physical mask has some relation, howsoever obscure, to the mental work happening underneath.

Karan Mahajan

It's getting worse under Prime Minister Modi. The economic miracle has failed, to a degree, and people are reaching back to a kind of imagined Hindu past for a feeling of pride. And that feeling of pride necessarily comes from denying any kind of Muslim heritage. People my age seem to be becoming illiberal in a way that I'm surprised by.

Karan Mahajan

Terrorists are as torn as anyone else.

Karan Mahajan

Apparently, the city of Delhi is a 'character' in my novels. I'd argue that it's a ... city... in my novels.

Karan Mahajan

Literature has become too psychological.

Karan Mahajan

I think there is a chance that Indian writers in America will start producing very interesting books in the years to come.

Karan Mahajan

There is not one New York but thousands - mixed-up conurbations and microclimates with their own internal logics and charms, dreams and juxtapositions, faces and tongues.

Karan Mahajan

Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call.

Karan Mahajan

New York City has no need to move on from 9/11 because, in a sense, it moved on days after, moments after.

Karan Mahajan

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.

Karan Mahajan

Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus' worth of lyrics, and so there's a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn't qualify as 'great literature.'

Karan Mahajan

I remember returning to Bangalore after a few months of travel and seeing it as a first-world city, like New York or San Francisco. This may be obvious to some people, but I grew up in Delhi, and I had no experience of how someone from a 'Tier 2' city may view a 'Tier 1' city. You really do emigrate between worlds when you come from those towns.

Karan Mahajan

Every time a blast happens, people ask, 'But why would someone do this?' Weirdly, it hasn't been answered well anywhere - neither in fiction nor non-fiction.

Karan Mahajan

If Asian America exists, it is because of systemic racism.

Karan Mahajan

In Delhi, where I grew up, commerce is brusque. You don't ask each other how your day has been. You might not even smile. I'm not saying this is ideal - it's how it is. You're tied together by a transaction. The customer doesn't tremble before complaining about how cold his food is.

Karan Mahajan

Asian-Americans are still regarded as 'other' by many of their fellow-citizens.

Karan Mahajan

I think people have turned terrorists into these larger-than-life devils and so are unable to write about them in the obvious way, which is as human, petty, bumbling.

Karan Mahajan

Terrorists are people, too - they are given to error. Naipaul and then DeLillo do a good job in their novels of drawing this out: I'm thinking of DeLillo's contention in 'Mao II' that terrorists have replaced writers as the people who 'alter the inner-life of the culture.' I thought that was marvellous!

Karan Mahajan

I met a number of young, striving, enterprising people in cities like Aligarh and Hubli. But the mental landscape of these towns is out of sync with their reality. Many of these towns are hellholes.

Karan Mahajan

Cobain the writer is funny and self-aware and snotty with a knack for off-the-cuff profundity. Remarking to a friend that his band will be called 'Nirvana,' he scribbles next to it the words 'Oooh eerie mystical doom.'

Karan Mahajan

When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.

Karan Mahajan

I think that a lot of terrorists have been middle class and, more surprisingly, many of them have been people who were not directly affected by the things they're angry about.

Karan Mahajan

I had a thick accent, and people didn't understand me, and I was ashamed, and I fumbled. I radiated an uncertain energy; sometimes baristas sensed this and wouldn't try to talk to me, and then an insecure voice in my head would cry, 'He's racist!'

Karan Mahajan

American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won't violate one another's privacies. This makes it a land of small talk.

Karan Mahajan

I tend to see my characters from inside and outside at once; this is a technique I use to retain a slight distance. It means my characters can act in unexpected ways on two axes: physical and mental. It isn't just, 'I thought this and then I did this,' which is the technique of the modern psychological novel.

Karan Mahajan

'This Is Not That Dawn' is remarkable in part for its careful and sensitive attention to women's lives - and also for its harsh critique of men and their failure to stop violence.

Karan Mahajan

I immigrated to the United States in 2001 for college.

Karan Mahajan

The deadpan brilliance of John McCrea has been underrepresented in music since 2004, when Cake served up 'Pressure Chief.'

Karan Mahajan