Category: words

“I’m aware more than I was before I had books published that any review is a bit arbitrary – it’s not really, say, The New York Times that’s authoritatively weighing in on the quality of a book, though it seems this way to the public. It’s actually one reviewer weighing in (maybe a daily reviewer like you, but maybe a random novelist like me who reviews one or two books a year), and all of us as individuals have quirky, subjective taste.”

“My parents were both village teachers. The village was full of women. And they had to work very hard during the day, there were no men left in the village, and after they were done with work – the village was full of benches – they would all come outside and they would talk. It was scary to listen to them, but it was also very interesting. They talked about war about death about loss, because some lost their husbands recently and this was much more exciting and much more interesting than reading the books that we had in the house.”

“After undergoing a vicious attack by caste leaders in his home state of Tamil Nadu, his novel One Part Woman last month was the subject of a landmark court decision defending the right of artists to critically depict their own communities. Recent interest in [Perumal] Murugan’s work has exploded, with five novels coming out, translated into English from the original Tamil. But Mr. Murugan seems unsure of what kind of writer he will be now.”

“If we think of a library as a city and a book as an individual house in that city, each sentence becomes one tiny component of that house. Some are mostly functional – the load-bearing wall, the grout between the bathroom tiles – while others are the details we remember and take away, perhaps recalling their texture and colour when we assemble our own verbal dwelling-place.”

“Siloe, which specialises in making facsimiles of old manuscripts, has bought the rights to make 898 exact replicas of the Voynich – so faithful that every stain, hole, sewn-up tear in the parchment will be reproduced.”

“Before there can be books, there has to be work: cleaning, sanding, painting, moving.”

“The immediate takeaway from last night’s awards is that like last year, a slate of works pushed onto the ballot by a coordinated campaign has considerable trouble actually succeeding, and where it does, it’s where slated works are considered universally popular.”

“I’m removed from the city but I can see it, hear it, smell it. When I first started to work here I thought it would be a good place to meet interviewers or have research discussions, but that idea quickly evaporated. I like it that no one else comes here.”

“I live on these borders – and these borders that allow me to see from multiple perspectives and kind of take things in and then kind of process certain ideas and certain stories in a very unique way. And that has led me to write this strange fiction that I write, which really isn’t that strange if you really look at it through a sort of skewed lens.”