Latest Karan Mahajan Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Of course I had a piece of luck I couldn't have imagine for myself in a million years: I got an agent. That sped up the process. I'd say it's a good idea, getting an agent.

  Karan Mahajan

  Luck, Imagine

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think I know a lot of fake two-faced Ivy League liberals, and I am constantly testing them to see if their liberalism is a conversational liberalism, one that depends solely on what will fly at a party. And I can tell when stuff like this happens, I swear to God, they are tomorrow's conservatives.

  Karan Mahajan

  Party, Thinking, League

  Source: therumpus.net

• I guess my point in general is that, if you look closely, who is in politics to self-identify - these are the people who flip easily, from right to left, pro-Muslim to anti-Muslim, etc. - versus who, whether on the right or left, is moved by genuine interest and empathy.

  Karan Mahajan

  People, Empathy, Interest

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think Indians will pick up on a lot of the direct commentary on Delhi, which Americans will obviously miss, while Americans might get more out of watching pop-culture play out in unusual ways in a foreign country. Who knows?

  Karan Mahajan

  Country, Thinking, Missing

  Source: therumpus.net

• The problem of empathy is pretty universal, and pretty much breaks down across America. People can't feel beyond their drawn borders. And skin color and culture have a lot to do with that.

  Karan Mahajan

  People, Empathy, Skins

  Source: therumpus.net

• I'm more interested than Philip Roth in understanding women, even if I do it imperfectly. But that book, Portnoy's Complaint, is literary punk in this way that is rare.

  Karan Mahajan

  Book, Understanding, Punk

  Source: therumpus.net

• As for the Jewish-American question, what's funny is that I grew up in India, and the Jewish-American comparison is better for second-generation Asians. I'm sure there's something about globalization that has globalized our neuroses, so that I, growing up in India, somehow turned out very similar to you. It's a weird thing, when you think about it, but everyone now is exposed to a mainstream white American world, wherever you are. And so there's this need to belong or measure yourself up to that white world, which leads to all sorts of straining.

  Karan Mahajan

  Growing Up, Thinking, World

  Source: therumpus.net

• I'm pretty private as a person - people generally think they know more about me than they do, because I gregariously advertise what I want known. So it pains me to think people might feel they have an insight into my personal matters, which they most certainly do not.

  Karan Mahajan

  Pain, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• People are rushed and inspired by the success of Indian writers, and are falling over themselves to write novels. Every Indian is writing a novel right now. No one wants to revise.

  Karan Mahajan

  Fall, Writing, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• I have to admit that I was terrified of ending the book, precisely because I go around saying about pretty much every book I read, "It fell apart at the end." I have friends who are waiting to ridicule me forever.

  Karan Mahajan

  Book, Waiting, Forever

  Source: therumpus.net

• When I worked as an editor, I read new novels being published in India every few days. They excited me tremendously for the first fifty pages or so, and boasted some true linguistic genius at times, but none of those writers could occupy more than one mind at once.

  Karan Mahajan

  Mind, Genius, Excited

  Source: therumpus.net

• There's this great fashion among writers, especially those who follow the transnational conservatives like V.S. Naipaul, to disavow one's place in the world as a sort of box that has sprung you but is only worthy of your scorn, because it once contained you. And I've been tempted to say foolish things, like "I am an American writer" or "I belong nowhere," but the truth is I'm perfectly proud of identifying as an Indian writer, even if that might hurt my bottom line.

  Karan Mahajan

  Fashion, Hurt, World

  Source: therumpus.net

• We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.

  Karan Mahajan

  Book, Writing, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• It's rare that you get to read, let alone teach, an arbitrary canon of your choosing in a tight time setting, and I tore through a fairly wide range of Indian writers, some contemporary - like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie - and others older, like R.K. Narayan. And I think what happened at that stage was that I was forced to take a position in my own writing style that was more fixed, as opposed to reading a book at a time and defining myself in opposition to or in awe of it.

  Karan Mahajan

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• America going into this huge, costly, never-ending war created huge debt, which became a huge problem in Congress and led to it stalling many times, putting a halt to different kinds of social progress.

  Karan Mahajan

  War, Progress, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The West, in the form of American capitalism, is seen as having won, but people are beginning to offer alternatives again, sometimes in retrograde ways like radical Islam.

  Karan Mahajan

  People, Islam, Sometimes

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I don't think sexual repression leads to violence, but I can see the situation where you're trying very hard to be very religious and to be good but pornography exerts a strong force on you, and one way to get further away from it would be to immerse yourself in a strong religious system.

  Karan Mahajan

  Religious, Strong, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• People in the East get a very skewed sense of America as this enormously rapaciously sexual place, this place where you have rappers and you have Donald Trump and things like that, which leads to a lot of confusion.

  Karan Mahajan

  Rapper, People, Confusion

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• terrorism is interesting to a novelist because it's a crime that's driven by an idea, as opposed to some kind of base materialist impulse. It's not like stealing from someone's house, or even assassinating someone. There are very complex ideological reasons behind these almost abstract acts of violence.

  Karan Mahajan

  Interesting, House, Violence

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• It's easier to set off a bomb that kills innocent civilians in a market than it is to plot an assassination, but that obviously was true before as well. I also think it's now easier to get attention for a small attack that goes off in a random market. It's almost like there's a marketplace for terror in the media, and these people are supplying the attacks, knowing that the media will cover them sensationally.

  Karan Mahajan

  Thinking, People, Attention

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When a bomb actually goes off, there's a lot of confusion, and people often don't know a bomb has gone off. For a long time, people might think there's been an electrical malfunction or something else that's exploded.

  Karan Mahajan

  Thinking, Long, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I also think that there's something about the graphic, political nature of such attacks, mixed with the fact that it all seems completely random to the victims.

  Karan Mahajan

  Thinking, Political, Victim

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• For whatever reason, people know that car crashes can happen but they don't live with that fear every day when they're driving, or they're able to overcome it.

  Karan Mahajan

  People, Car, Overcoming

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There's no way of preventing the media from covering attacks as huge events and until the media stops doing that, they will be huge in people's consciousness, and we have to treat these things differently from the smaller random acts of violence.

  Karan Mahajan

  Violence, Consciousness

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The feeling I got from my research is that the victims of bombings end up becoming as alienated from the government as the terrorists who cause the attacks.

  Karan Mahajan

  Feelings, Victim, Terrorist

  Source: www.guernicamag.com