Postcolonial Literature Quotes

One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.

I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'.

Indian writers have appropriated English as an Indian language, and that gives a certain freshness to the way we write.

My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet.

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky' by Lesley Nneka Arimah blew my mind.

I am very interested in writers from the Francophone world. I like Kamel Daoud a lot, for example. In "The Meursault Investigation" and "Zabor," he shows a passion for the French language, a very special way of writing that belongs to those who live on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea. It is language that connects us. It allows people there to cling to our history, our culture and sometimes also our values.

When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.

There are distinctions between Indian and Pakistani writers.

When I was in my 20s in the 1970s, I read all of Jean Rhys. I have reread very little since because the first impressions were so powerful they have stayed with me.

I'm a brown girl from a Punjabi pind raised in Toronto. I don't expect literary critics and purists to understand the nuances of my experiences, and the experiences of the people around me... And my tradition holds that there is a magic in the written word. So how I write, what I write of, and why I write all comes naturally.

A postcolonial writer who has often been credited with mixing the mundane with the magical, and history with fiction, is Salman Rushdie.

For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I had imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the non-resident Indian.

When I was a child, there were two Nigerian writers in every bookshop: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

I didn't know V. S. Naipaul very well, and to a large extent, my acquaintance with him was limited to meetings at literary festivals.