My grandfather says that’s what books are for,” Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. “To travel without moving an inch.

I can’t tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until...

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.

On weekdays, as soon as she picked Bela from the bus stop and brought her home, she went straight into the kitchen, washing up the morning dishes she’d ignored, then getting dinner started. She measured...

Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.

I’ve seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn’t occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me,...

In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.

If I stop to think about fans, or best-selling, or not best-selling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It’s like staring at the mirror all day.

I’ve inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the...

The blood of too many, dissolving the very stain.

There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was...

A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading.

With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.

My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a...

While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only...

No man wants a woman who dresses like a dishwasher.

I don’t know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents’ marriage. And it’s interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison.

He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the...

At 6:30, which was when the national news began, my father raised the volume and adjusted the antennas. Usually I occupied myself with a book, but that night my father insisted that I pay attention.

On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani refugees had fled, seeking safety over the Indian border.

Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging through her like some helplessly mating pair of insects. Anger at him for dying when he might have lived....

She had generated alternative versions of herself. She had insisted at brutal cost on these conversions. Layering her life, only to strip it bare. Only to be alone in the end. Her life had been...

In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.

But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of his dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light...

It’s easy to set a story anywhere if you get a good guidebook and get some basic street names, and some descriptions, but, for me, yes, I am indebted to my travels to India for...

When I sit down to write, I don’t think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.

In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, ‘Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?’ I...

There was the focus of seeking pleasure, and the numbing effect, once they were finished, removing all specific thoughts from her brain. It ushered in the solid, dreamless sleep that otherwise eluded her.

Some Indians will come up and say that a story reminded them of something very specific to their experience. Which may or may not be the case for non-Indians.

I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device – recording and projecting.

He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy...

It didn’t matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

Will you remember this day, Gogol?” his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head. “How long do I have to remember it?”...

The reactions haven’t differed; the concerns have been different. When I read for a predominantly Indian audience, there are more questions that are based on issues of identity and representation.

I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.

…that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.

The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold.

That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.

You know, since the reviews have come out and people have reacted to it, I’ve realized that is in a sense what has happened. But as I was writing them, I didn’t feel a part...

Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it’s an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I’ll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for...

Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold.

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.

Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.

Eventually he begins to practice his new signature in the margins of the paper. He tries it in various styles, his hand unaccustomed to the angles of the N, the dotting of the two i’s....

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.

A woman who had fallen out of love with her life

For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don’t think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the...

He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor’s office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of...