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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
