Akhil Sharma quotes:

My wife is the most wonderful woman in the world, and my parents are the most extraordinary father and mother.

Family Life' is a blueprint of my life. It was horrible and physically gruesome in a way the book doesn't attempt to capture. It was emotionally very bleak.

Writing about what happened to my brother and to my family was awful. It was hard to look back at how much suffering there was and at how certain bad situations were made worse by our decisions.

During my breakdown, many things, tiny things I had not even registered before, had begun to torment me with guilt. I used to steal Splenda from Starbucks. I would go into a Starbucks whenever I needed the sweetener and would take a fistful of packets, even when I didn't buy a coffee.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

When you read Chekhov, everything has an even gray tone. When you read 'Family Life', everything has an even white tone. It is almost like when you paint on paper, and you can see the paper through the paint.

I thought it was quite wonderful coming to America. I think immigration is a very difficult thing, but America is a very wonderful place.

When someone gets a success, and we, too, have done good work and sometimes even better work than the person who has just triumphed, we wonder: 'Why did success pass me by?'

'Family Life' is a blueprint of my life. It was horrible and physically gruesome in a way the book doesn't attempt to capture. It was emotionally very bleak.

I know how to write fiction well.

I need to tell the things that are important but which don't make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.

My parents are deeply pious Hindus.

We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

It's easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don't want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.

Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?

I am shamelessly biased about the people in my life, and it makes sense to me that other people are the same.

We are often unaware of how much we love the people around us. This is true for everyone. We may think that we love certain people, but we don't know how profoundly we love them.

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.

When someone gets a success, and we, too, have done good work and sometimes even better work than the person who has just triumphed, we wonder: Why did success pass me by?

The little babies are missing their families from their past lives. The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies. The tears loosen their memories so they can slide away. They cry at the life they have lost, and then they cry at everything they'll forget.

Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn't. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.

To me exposition always contains tenderness. While a dramatized scene is a way of proving and guaranteeing an emotional experience for the reader, exposition assumes that the reader is sophisticated and can see the universal.

Intern will resonate not only with doctors, but with anyone who has struggled with the grand question 'What should I do with my life?' In a voice of profound honesty and intelligence, Sandeep Jauhar gives us an insider's look at the medical profession and also a dramatic account of the psychological challenges of early adulthood.

It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.

It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.

Certainly the details of our life are unique. Spending time thinking of how I am different from someone else, however, does not tend to be very productive.

People often need to describe things quickly and so they use a shorthand. The problem is that after they use a label, they begin to think only in terms of the label instead of the totality of the experience a novel provides.

I can't have composite characters. I can't attribute dialogue to someone based simply on my memory and not based on notes taken at the time that the words were spoken.

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.