They said it in Jaipur Litfest 2016

The novel includes many matters without excluding anything. [...] It remains a hybrid form; there is no single way to read or write a novel. 

Colm Toibin

A moralist, but not a moraliser

“I’m a moralist but not a moraliser. I’m very interested in how and why people act as they do, but I don’t as a novelist ever try to tell people how to behave.”
--Julian Barnes

Yann Martel's Compromises and Drafts

Compromises? Hundreds. Drafts? Dozens. I suppose there are some modern-day Jane Austens who write finished polished prose in which only a word or two is changed here and there. I ain’t one of those writers. I’m a messy, untutored blunderer. I might have been left to my ways if it hadn’t been for the bizarre success of Life of Pi, which—among many other consequences—brought me to the attention of many fine, sharp-minded editors.

An article I published on Medium in response to an invite

I write because…

I’ve never really thought about why I write.

I hate entertaining somebody with my writing. I like to see writers as thinkers, visionaries, futurists, social reformers, even activists — but never as entertainers. You write to entertain me, you lose my respect.

Information and Literature

"In my books, I try to use every channel of information possible, keeping in mind that information is not what is most important in literature, meaning is.” 

Morning News Tournament of Books 2016 begins with a great announcement

"For 12 years, we’ve done this silly, moronic, informative, all-consuming, fascinating, weirdly fun thing. So have many of you. Let’s do it again."

In the beginning was the Word

"Word invokes existence, it matures a man, it carries a man to something great and valiant, it makes a man dream, and drives a man to much humanity."

via

Writing at the age of 80

"I’m not an opera person at all, but I think of Verdi, for example, as someone who was writing at the age of 80 work comparable to what he was doing 50 years earlier.

"I want people who can make magic" / Gordon Lish

I want people who can make magic. That’s what the job at hand is. To take the elements of the language, to take these tarnished and exhausted entities, and to cause them to move in a way they’ve never moved otherwise. To imbue them with movement through the particular imposition of one’s will, one’s desire.

When moral police stalks a writer

"Literature remains an unpredictable dialectic between the public and the private, the alien and the familiar, the individual and the collective; individual literary works may have elements of idiosyncrasy that may not always satisfy the conventions we have historically set up through social contracts that make the state, or those which evolve to define communities. Even so, literature exists in continuity with life, not in opposition to it.

To Figure Out What Your Set of Two or Three Things is

Some people do beautiful nature descriptions. They write great dialogue. They do a really intense neurotic voice. There’s a million different skills that people might turn out to have. So I think part of it is to write enough when you’re young to figure out what your set of two or three things is.

- George Saunders

Would you buy "A Poetics Of Fiction"?

It's of course a lucrative idea to write a book for aspiring writers who are swarming the physical and cyber spaces across the world and are ready to spend fortunes for their success. But here is a book with atrocious title "A Poetics of Fiction". 400 pages. Six chapters. Title of Chapter One :Open your savings account.

Quratulain Haider:Undisputed Queen of Urdu Literature

The Nation (Pakistan) has an interesting article on Quratulain Haider, arguably the most powerful writer of Urdu Literature.

Although never very vocal about it, Ainee was a feminist through and through. She lived a very independent life on her own terms. Ainee was a working woman all her life.

Karl Ove Knausgaard on novel writing

When the novel becomes a mask it can be very entertaining, possibly even providing some insight, but it doesn’t come close to life. It doesn’t live.

A Page Is well written when...

A page is well written when the labour and pleasure of truthful narration supplant any other concern, including a concern with formal elegance. I belong to the category of writers who throw out the final draft and keep the rough when this practice ensures a higher degree of authenticity.
--Elena Ferrante

All You Wanted to Know about Gabriel Gearcia Marquez

The Secret History of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Don DeLillo understands terrorism better than any political expert/political acdemic?

In Aljazeera America, Scott Beauchamp has an interesting observation:

A better guide to the subtleties of terrorism than proclamations of military experts or political academics can be found in the fiction of Don DeLillo. Besides reminding us that terrorism isn’t particularly new — or particular to Muslims, for that matter — the settings in which his novels are based give a sense of the zeitgeist in which he was working. This is the context in which he still works and in which we all live.

Svetlana Alexievich's Nobel Lecture

" Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows much, much more about itself than it has recorded in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. I'm interested in the history of the soul. The everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits, or disdains. I work with missing history.

Recommended Reading: Why does Indian writing in English still have to defend itself against charges of siding with oppressors?

Why does Indian writing in English still have to defend itself against charges of siding ...

"There has to be a way for English writing to live along with writing in other Indian languages. This will require greater humility on the part of those of us who write in English, and on the part of the complex of publishers and retailers who support the process."

Gabriel Josipovici Quotes

**When all public responses are not just negative but dismissive it’s sometimes hard to keep going. We are not Buddhists, we need some sense that what we are doing is more than self-indulgence. But of course in the end we go on writing because we have to/want to. (David Plante once said to me: ‘Remember, Gabriel, no-one asked you to do this.’ More wise words.) I have now accepted that I will always only appeal to a very small section of readers, anyway in this country, but probably everywhere, but I have also come to feel in the last few years (not in the eighties and nineties) that there is a growing body of people for whom my writing really matters, and that is heart-warming and encourages me to keep going.