People are infinitely more interesting than characters that I come up with. Because the characters I come up with are basically combinations of people I've met. Combinations. You select certain details, that's all.

I'm not interested in, and not capable of, direct politics. What I can do - I try to figure out the underlying principles. I'm interested in the psychological forces that divide Indian people as a nation.

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.

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.

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.

I feel history is more of a story than a lesson. I know this idea of presentism: this idea of constantly evoking the past to justify the present moment. A lot of people will tell you, history is how we got here. And learning from the lessons of history. But that's imperfect. If you learn from history you can do things for all the wrong reasons

There are different reasons why people write: for themselves, or for other writers, or to get prizes, or keeping an audience in mind. In my case, it felt really nice that a certain type of readership read the book and liked it, even though my readership is not as wide as certain popular books.

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.

It's not my intention to be understood. I will continue writing for a readership that is fundamentally local. Because if you want to produce universal writing, you run the risk of losing your local knowledge. Your views are so universalist that the street aspect disappears.

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.