Akhil Sharma Quotes

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.

I think immigrants, when they’re stressed, think that there’s something wrong with America, when it’s really just difficult to leave a country and all that you know.

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?’

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

As a teacher, I can help my students see what is working and not working. I can show them certain solutions. I can guide them to books that will serve as role models. Largely, though, one learns to write almost like developing muscle memory, and this requires years of effort.

Ernest Hemingway has been the most important influence on me as a writer. But at a certain point as a writer, I realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.

I know how to write fiction well.

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.

I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir.

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.

For me, a lot of the humor comes not from innocence but from characters trying to figure out how to get what they need. I don’t try to be funny, but am relieved when an opportunity comes up for humor.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.