Quotes

Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.

I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life.

In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.

Everything in American public life, when it comes to race relations, serves as a frame for a history of violence and degrading humiliation.

I haven't reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat.

For several years before I began 'The Folded World,' I worked at an urban college campus and had a job in a tutoring center, and people would come into the tutoring center, and for some reason, they just kept telling me their life stories.

I was born on an even keel. Family lore says I never cried, even at birth. I felt at ease on earth, in the right place. And like many children, I took comfort in life's regularity: Every few days it rained, the school bus came and went, and my parents were rooted in their union.

Policy people suffer their own kind of agony, and no wonder. After all, what is the average life of the policy person? You go into government if you are lucky, do your best, aren't appreciated, take all the blame for policies for which you are only partly responsible, leave, realize your reputation has been damaged, maybe permanently.

The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.

If expectations of lifetime earnings drop, then so will spending.

It's a funny thing: my name in Arabic means hope, so I suppose I have to live by that principle. Hope is desire, feeling, and investing in a projection of something that doesn't yet exist. At its best, you witness its alchemy in your life, turning something that was once in the mind into reality. At its worst, it's delusion.

Doing comedy and romance is easy, if I compare it with playing the role of a real-life person.

'Harjeeta' is a film based on the inspiring story of a sportsman, grappling with life's struggles, and surviving against all odds and managing to end the nation's 15-year-old drought in the Junior Championship by lifting the coveted trophy.

Dad has worked as a banker at the same firm in Boston, living in the same suburban neighborhood for over 50 years. Later in life, when I got out of graduate school and imagined myself living the life of a writer like Hemingway or Kerouac, his practical self inevitably encouraged me to get a steady a job and raise a family, just like he did.

I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.

Say I lived until 80 and read a book a month seriously, that means I was looking at 480 books left in my life. If I had only 480 left, I wanted to stop sifting through material I didn't have confidence in and turn my attention to those that I know merited my reading.

I had a 20-year career. I have two children. The advantage of writing later in my life is that I already had a whole mature realm of accomplishments and responsibilities, an identity outside of being a writer.

I'm not an environmentalist. I'm a cultural repairman. It's all about efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, prosperous and life-sustaining.

The less routine the more life.

Thought means life, since those who do not think so do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.

I live a pretty anonymous life.

I don't know anyone who is a writer who isn't influenced by the relationships in their life.

You need a strong sense of 'otherness' to be able to create in your life.

As I've moved along - not only my life, but my career and things like that - you look at yourself and start going, 'Oh, man, are you still doing what you set out to do? Are the ideals you had still the same?' Sometimes you measure up and sometimes you don't.

I've been called a traitor a few times in my life by some of my countrymen.