Upamanyu Quotes & Sayings

Well, life is dark, isn't it? Mostly, it's dreadful. At the same time, death is funny too. I mean, look at the fuss we make of it. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

He absent-mindedly fondled his crotch and then whipped his hand away.No masturbation,he suddenly decided.He tried to think about this but sustained logical thought on one topic was difficult and unnecessary.No,i am not wasting any semen on Madna.It was an impulse,but he felt that he should record it.In the diary under that date,he wrote,'From today no masturbation.Test your will,you bastard'. Then he wondered at his bravado.No masturbation at all?That was impossible. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

It's a huge headache - the more money you have, the more hassles. I find money very uncomfortable. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

When the babies were very young, I found it difficult to write. I told myself each time that it would be different, I was used to it now, but with every child, for the first four months, I would accomplish nothing. — Ayelet Waldman

I don't think I would do better books if I wrote full time. I write for amateurish reasons. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

Often people that tell others they are "extremely polite" when the situation calls for tact and bluntness are not actually polite people. Instead, they hide behind the word "polite" because they have low self esteem or hidden agendas. Sadly, they impolitely confuse the hell out of everyone, send mixed signals, which then makes people question their sanity and motives. — Shannon L. Alder

Amidst one's daily clutter, one doesn't usually reflect on the splendour of being free because - naturally - one has to get on with the business of living. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

Advances don't fundamentally interest me. It sounds terribly naive, but money doesn't really mean anything to me. If a lot of money came my way, I'm certainly not going to say no. But it hasn't come my way as yet, and I'm not heartbroken. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

The colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces. — Frantz Fanon

So much better to write pen on paper; you can do it anywhere, say, while stuck at the airport. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

In his essay,Agastya had said that his real ambition was to be a domesticated male stray dog because they lived the best life.They were assured of food,and because they were stray they didn't have to guard a house or beg or shake paws or fetch trifles or be clean or anything similarly meaningless to earn their food.They were servile and sycophantic when hungry;once fed,and before sleep,they wagged their tails perfunctorily whenever their hosts passes,as an investment for future meals.A stray dog was free,he slept a lot,barked unexpectedly and only when he wanted to,and got a lot of sex. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

Anyone who has grown up in Delhi knows it's horrible. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

What the sunshine is to the field and to the flowers the Holy Spirit is to the life of man. — Henry B. Eyring

I feel completely at home in the absurdities of India. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

Only when you die will you cease to feel ridiculous. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

We are men without ambition, and all we want is to be left alone, in peace so that we can try and be happy. So few people will understand this simplicity. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

The Collectorship of Madna is the seventh post that he has held in eight years. He is quite philosophic about the law that governs the transfer of civil servants; he sees it as a sort of corollary to the law of karma, namely, that the whole of life passes through innumerable and fundamentally mystifying changes, and these changes are sought to be determined by our conduct, our deeds (otherwise, we would quite simply lose our marbles); only thus can we even pretend to satisfactorily explain the mystery of suffering, which is a subject that has troubled thoughtful souls all over the world since time immemorial. It is also a hypothesis that justifies the manifest social inequalities of the Hindu community. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

Land is important everywhere, all kinds of land. But you have lived in cities. There you cannot sense the importance of agricultural land, its the real wealth. Each of these squares and hexagrams could be worth lakhs. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

Most of us, Ogu, live with a vague dissatisfaction, if we are lucky. Living as we do, upon us is imposed a particular rhythm - birth, education, a job, marriage, then birth again, but we all have minds don't we?
For most Indians of your age, just getting any job is enough. You were more fortunate for you had options before you.
These sound like paternal homilies, don't they, but you've always had surrogate parents, your aunts, and then in Delhi, your Pultukaku, and we've not really spent much time together. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

The more languages you know, the less likely you are to become a terrorist. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

She collapsed. I stepped forward and caught her. I thought of two trees nearly unrooted and leaning against each other. — Peter Heller

For me, comedy is richer and larger than anything else. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

I'm happy for you Agastya,you're leaving for a more meaningful context. This place is like a parody, a complete farce, they're trying to build another Cambridge here. At my old University I used to teach Macbeth to my MA English classes in Hindi.English in India is burlesque. But now you'll get out of here to somehow a more real situation. In my time I'd wanted to give this Civil Service exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L. H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

People should have literary and cultural taste and should not bomb hotels. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

Governance is complex, difficult, and on the whole, thankless - why ever should the Bright Young Things leave the management of their hotels, newspapers, banks, TV channels and corporations to join, like fleas on a behemoth, the government? Wherein lies the difference between the two worlds? — Upamanyu Chatterjee

... the pain of neuralgia ... she knew what they thought. That she was cold. Couldn't feel. But in fact she felt too much. Too deeply. — Louise Penny

I need to have some depth in my characters. That's why they are all Bengalis. I can't imagine writing a book with someone called Saxena as the hero. — Upamanyu Chatterjee