On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani refugees had fled, seeking safety over the Indian border.
The highlight of my undergraduate years was a year-long Shakespeare course I took with Edward Tayler.
I've always been searching to arrive at a certain voice that will probably elude me forever.
In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment.
I'm the least-experimental writer. The idea of trying things just for the sake of pushing the envelope, that's never really interested me.
Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.
Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever... this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.' All the details get watered down but don't quite disappear.
It was important to me to become day-to-day fluent and functional in another language, and about 10 years ago, I went to Rome for the first time and felt an instant gut connection and wanted to get to know the city.
I find it really liberating to be in a place where I am a foreigner in every way. I've lived with this all my life - this divide, this bifurcation. And in Italy, I don't feel it. There's none of that tension, only the expectation I place on myself to speak the language well. I find it relaxing. Something drops away, and I observe.
I think, like any artist or any writer, I just want to have that pure freedom of expression and of thought - the freedom to explore and move in unexpected ways.
A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading.
In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.
The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.
I'm bound to fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn't torment or grieve me.
The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of visits. I never saw her having any health problems - but I knew she wanted to be married.
As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go.
Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I'll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for this book and put it behind me along with the rest of the book, as I write more books.
Writing is so humbling; there's no confidence involved.
Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.
