Neel Mukherjee Quotes & Sayings

Prasanta, who was later going to be sorry to see Purba go, experienced the dazed detachment someone feels when events they ignited go far beyond a reasonable trajectory they had imagined. — Neel Mukherjee

Nostalgia is a particular affliction of immigrant fiction, and it's led to a kind of sclerosis of the form. I hate nostalgia, and I feel it's good to be aware of the politics of these genres. — Neel Mukherjee

So Sona does what he has perfected: he becomes two persons, an outer one that goes through the motions required of him, and an inner one that is the true, pure he. — Neel Mukherjee

There seem to be fewer stars; it must be getting close to dawn. No sign of your face or your name in the sky tonight. What is going to happen to the two of us? Doesn't that question haunt you, too, and keep you awake? It's eating me slowly from the inside. It's all impossible, everything between us, every possibility, imaginable or unimaginable, is impossible. — Neel Mukherjee

It's always good to get good reviews. I read my reviews. There are a lot of writers who don't read their reviews at all. I read them; then I put them away because it's not good to engage with them too much. — Neel Mukherjee

Given that all our lives rest on work that defines us, the business of labor, the wealth that work manifests itself to, I find it odd that not much is written about it. We talk about relationships, damage, adultery, revolution, but we don't talk about work. — Neel Mukherjee

I couldn't make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those had little got less. The world ran on this law and only on this. — Neel Mukherjee

Nostalgia can be extremely powerful in the right hands: think of the intense longing in the films Andrei Tarkovsky made after he left the U.S.S.R. They wring your soul. — Neel Mukherjee

To write, I think one must sit in one place and be bored. Boredom is a very good state for writers to be. Things cook away in your head when you're bored, and suddenly one day, you have a book or a germ of a book. — Neel Mukherjee

Why did they all think alike? Typical bourgeois brainwashed homogeneity? How else could this unvarying calculus abouth the worth of one's own kind measured against the lives of others have come about? — Neel Mukherjee

There is a large gap between being an activist out of the idealism that comes from books, conversations, the fire of youth and being one because you have lived through the depredations that life has thrown at you. — Neel Mukherjee

Work defines our lives and our place in the world. — Neel Mukherjee

When a book is going well, it tells you where to go. — Neel Mukherjee

I'm much more attracted to the miscegenation of cultures than to harmony. — Neel Mukherjee

The Naxalite revolution - an ultra-left Maoist movement - in Bengal, and elsewhere in India, in the late 1960s provides one strand of 'The Lives of Others.' — Neel Mukherjee

I grew up in financially straitened circumstances and meat, which was expensive, was a rare thing at mealtimes. We ate meat about once a month, if that. — Neel Mukherjee

Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside. — Neel Mukherjee

When they reach what Sona assumes to be Ashish Roy's room, he notices that a hurricane lamp has been placed aleady on a wooden stool. It casts more shadows than it illuminates. — Neel Mukherjee

I don't read my books, so I don't allow myself the dangerous luxury of toying with the idea of doing things differently. — Neel Mukherjee

Being a Bengali, one is surprised when all the endless spume and froth of talk suddenly reveals itself to be the front of a gigantic wave of action. — Neel Mukherjee

I start with theory rather than people. I don't like novels which have no theoretical or philosophical underpinning. I hate the contemporary novel where people just sit and talk to each other about their relationships. — Neel Mukherjee

I wouldn't call myself a 'literary critic,' just a book reviewer. — Neel Mukherjee

Whoever said that time blunts all pain did not quite understand that bluntness can wound as grievously as sharp points and edges; — Neel Mukherjee

Not for the first time in his life he felt himself fall into the gap between felings and their articulation in language. — Neel Mukherjee

I coudn't make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those who had little got less. The world ran on this law, and only on this. Some magnetic field began to develop around those who had a little something - power or money or influence or friends, you name it - and the more these things accrued, the more that magnetism increased (it was as if the things that flowed to them had attracting properties themselves), drawing more inside its orbit and away from those whose funds were already depleted, making them even more impoverished, depriving them of even more. It was like gravity: everything flowed, and could only flow, in one direction. Or a type of circularity: the more you had, the more will come to you, the more you will have. — Neel Mukherjee

This is the hope the Maoists offered, the hope of dark clouds gathering over parched, fractured soil; it could rain or it could not, but they brought something new into their lives: possibility. — Neel Mukherjee

I have one very bad experience with a U.K. publisher, who gave it out to be understood that she wanted to publish my book and made me do a lot of changes, all outside a contract, only to reject it in the end. — Neel Mukherjee

The sanction made the unsaid even more palpable, as if the thoughts had been waiting outside the room, and had at last been given permission to enter; now there was no denying their presence. — Neel Mukherjee

India introduced Britain to vegetarianism - see Tristram Stuart's excellent first book on this - and it is possible, indeed all too easy, to be a vegetarian in India and eat extraordinarily good, varied food every day, with very few 'repeats.' — Neel Mukherjee

Mollycoddling was the mother's duty; the father's lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love the professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to the truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds. — Neel Mukherjee

Things are so different now that it feels they were all different people then, like characters you read about in a book, not the younger version of your own self. — Neel Mukherjee

I think there's a joy to be had in taking readers where they just don't want to go. If you are writing a properly realist novel, then don't blink. Why not see something for what it is and render it truthfully? I find it a good way of going about writing - not to blink. — Neel Mukherjee

Within minutes a small crowd had gathered: what could be more interesting than other people's lives? — Neel Mukherjee

Charubala, of course, was mindful that the Ghoshes were not perched on a high rung of the caste-ladder, so she was grateful to have a few upon whom she could look down. The gratitude expressed itself as venom for those below. — Neel Mukherjee

Battles are won one by one and enemy battalions are destroyed one at a time. Factories are built one at a time. Farmers cultivate one plot after another. We serve ourselves the total amount of food we can consume, but we eat it spoonful by spoonful; to eat it in one go would be impossible.This is known as the piecemeal solution. — Neel Mukherjee

all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself. — Neel Mukherjee

One writes what one can, or has to, write. — Neel Mukherjee

People talk of rage as something fluid; it boils, flows, spills over, scalds. For her, it is not any of these things. Instead it is a vast, frozen sea, solid as rock, unthawable. She has never seen the sea, but she knows it wraps around three-quarters of the world. All her anger is that and more. — Neel Mukherjee

It was enough that I knew my soul sang, I didn't have to break into minstrelsy. — Neel Mukherjee

To be an Indian writer is to write, necessarily and inevitably, about politics, so it was a given that the story of the Ghoshes, the family at the centre of 'The Lives of Others,' should have a political soul. — Neel Mukherjee

You're eating like a sparrow nowadays. You've hardly touched your food.' 'You give me so much. There are so many dishes.' 'Where so many? One dal, one fry, one vegetable dish, a bit of fish, that's it.' 'And you don't think that's a lot?' 'You've eaten like this all your life,' she said, baffled. 'Don't you agree we eat too much?' 'Who, you and I?' she asked, still puzzled. 'No, no, by "we" I mean all of us, everyone in our social and economic class. — Neel Mukherjee

I can see the Milky Way. It's like the smudge of a cosmic giant's fingerprints on the inky black sky. And stars - so many millions and millions of them that, if I let my eyes unfocus for a bit, they too become a smear in the sky. — Neel Mukherjee

Remember that what seems zeitgeisty today is the cause of tomorrow's bafflement or, worse, ridicule. — Neel Mukherjee

The incident, played out for, it seemed, a few infinitely elastic seconds, caused a certain calculation to go through the boy's head. — Neel Mukherjee

Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen. — Neel Mukherjee

The freedom fighters in India's long struggle for independence from British rule, or members of the African National Congress, were once classed as terrorists. History, as they say, is written by victors, but history also has many cunning corridors - how much time must elapse before all those tricky side-passages are revealed? — Neel Mukherjee

Her veins and arteries ran with a bitter fluid, not blood, Adinath exclaimed in fury one day. — Neel Mukherjee

In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help. — Neel Mukherjee

Boro-babu, the world does not change, you destroy yourself trying to change it, but it remains as it is. The world is very big, and we are very small. Why cause people who love you to go through such misery because of it? — Neel Mukherjee

The bestseller charts, a sure indicator of public taste, tell us with relentless frequency that Marian Keyes or Jeffrey Archer is a better author, by some dizzying six-figure sum, both in numbers of copies and money, than, say, J. M. Coetzee or Patrick White. Are they right? — Neel Mukherjee

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.' — Neel Mukherjee

Numbers never lie; one can make them, of course, as one can make anything speak another story in another tongue, but they do not have the inherent falsehood that words carry. — Neel Mukherjee

Meat-fetishiser that I was, I used to find willed vegetarianism inexplicable. It was one thing to be a vegetarian because of religious and caste reasons - something I was familiar with because of my Indian upbringing - but to choose to be a vegetarian when you could eat meat for every meal every day? That seemed madness to me. — Neel Mukherjee

This is how this world runs, a small group of people who know each other, a closed world of intense curiosity in other people's lives because your own is just empty, dead time. — Neel Mukherjee

Innocence is a pretty dangerous thing, you know. Revisit Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' or, for that matter, Greene's 'The Quiet American' to find out how destructive it can be. — Neel Mukherjee

Writing a book is as difficult or as easy as any other job. Everyone's job is difficult. So to fetishize difficulties in writing as something extra-difficult or something very privileged - I don't buy that at all. — Neel Mukherjee

One generation builds, the next generation consumes it to nothing; that is the abiding truth of life. — Neel Mukherjee

It could be said of him that while others chased the mirage of happiness, he was happy with being content. — Neel Mukherjee