Hari Kunzru Quotes & Sayings

I realized I had a novel on my hands, but didn't know where it was going to go. So I thought, 'I'm going to do everything that you're not supposed to do when you plan a novel; I'm going to step back and let this thing take itself wherever it wants to go, and I'm not going to worry about how things connect until later on.' — Hari Kunzru

But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been. — Hari Kunzru

There are things about our world that almost by their nature defy our ability to comprehend them. Some people use a religious register to deal with that - they call it God and that's a way of domesticating it. — Hari Kunzru

She thought she was a feminist. She was only bad tempered. — Hari Kunzru

I'm fascinated by the emergence of a global class. They're highly mobile; they reject the idea of place. — Hari Kunzru

In good novelistic fashion, the discovery I've made is that it's complicated. I think that's one of good things about exploring these questions in a non-polemic, fictional way: you get to feel out territory rather than take positions. Through writing this, I can understand the impulse to faith, how people make meaning, how people make community, without having to say, do this, don't do that, or I believe, I don't believe. — Hari Kunzru

Say there are three identical-looking pizza joints on a street. Two of those will always be empty. The third will have a line of people patiently waiting, checking their phones. There's always one place that's the place. That's how it works. — Hari Kunzru

I suffer from vertigo. It's paralyzing in extreme situations. The most scared I've been as an adult was trying to conquer that fear by going climbing in Wales. — Hari Kunzru

Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama's election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening. — Hari Kunzru

There's nothing New York likes more than a thing. Or a place. Or a place that's a thing. Or a thing that happens to be a place. — Hari Kunzru

Critchley and Webster's fierce, witty exploration of Hamlet makes most other writing about Shakespeare seem simpleminded. — Hari Kunzru

There are still some terrible cliches in the presentation of Indian fiction. The lotus flower. The hennaed hands. In mainland Europe, people still slap these images on my books and I go bananas. — Hari Kunzru

In my early teens, science fiction and fantasy had an almost-total hold over my imagination. Their outcast status was part of their appeal. — Hari Kunzru

I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium. — Hari Kunzru

I think it's important for all culturally literate people to understand the technological substrate of new developments. — Hari Kunzru

Driving was almost the only thing that felt natural in America. It was traditional. It was patriotic. When you accelerated, you could almost hear the crowd cheering you on. — Hari Kunzru

I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit. — Hari Kunzru

There's an explosion of Indian fiction of all kinds, from military thrillers to chicklit. I think that's exciting. — Hari Kunzru

Intellectuals who live in Hungary, or who wish to work or lecture there, are extremely circumspect in their criticism. — Hari Kunzru

I stand on my public record as a defender of the human rights of Muslims, notably my work for Moazzam Begg and other British Muslims detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay. — Hari Kunzru

You're too old to be saying to me, as you did recently, that you weren't 'interested in politics'. You're lucky that politics feels optional, something it's safe to ignore. Most people in the world have it forced on them — Hari Kunzru

There was, as she put it, nothing to stop me. So I followed the path of educated misfits through the ages and got a job in a bookshop. — Hari Kunzru

I'm interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence - that it's possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions - is fascinating. — Hari Kunzru

As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold. — Hari Kunzru

Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, believed that sound waves never completely die away, that they persist, fainter and fainter, masked by the day-to-day noise of the world. Marconi thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to ancient times. — Hari Kunzru

Several times in my life I've gone through long periods without sex or any other kind of physical contact. The hunger it produces is deep and low; it's possible to lose track of it, to forget or fail to perceive how it's emptied everything out of you and made the world papery and thin. Touch starved, you brush against existence like a stick against dry leaves. You become insubstantial yourself, a hungry ghost. — Hari Kunzru

Suburbia is all about private ownership and not having to share, and it leads to a paranoid, defensive mindset. I know this, having grown up in Essex. — Hari Kunzru

I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love. — Hari Kunzru

These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives. — Hari Kunzru

When I try to understand somebody, create a character, I fall into them. When I think writers are telling me what to think, I get harrumphy. — Hari Kunzru

I can see a version of my life where it all becomes meaningless. On a good day, writing seems noble. Other times, it's narcissistic and pointless. — Hari Kunzru

Some books I've kept because the binding is beautiful - I'm unlikely ever to read my grandmother's copy of 'The Life of Lord Nelson.' I'm addicted to secondhand bookshops. — Hari Kunzru

Legality is just the name for everything that's not dangerous for the ruling order. — Hari Kunzru

All things are transitory. All things must pass. Attachments whether to material possessions, to people, to places to name, are futile. Despite your clinging, these things will fade away. — Hari Kunzru