Skip to content

I believe that if you are literate, all literature that you expose yourself to is your heritage to claim
or reject. (from 1996 interview)

— Bharati Mukherjee

Another quote →

Topics

Books

More quotes by Bharati Mukherjee

Literature can help bring about change of hearts and minds and then put pressure for political, legislative change. (2007)

Novelists aim for fullness of catharsis, not a political pamphlet. (1996)

An author focuses on a few individual characters, and hopes that a larger frisson of emotion and revelation comes across to the reader. (1996)

I was born into a class that did not live in its native language. I was born into a city that feared its future, and trained me for emigration.

A Four Hundred-Year-Old Woman" in The Writer on Her Work: New Essays in New Territory (1991)

The most moving form of praise I receive from readers can be summed up in three words: I never knew. Meaning, I see these people (call them Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese) around me all the time and I never knew they had an inner life.

A Four Hundred-Year-Old Woman" in The Writer on Her Work: New Essays in New Territory (1991)

All Bharati Mukherjee quotes →

You may also like

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Bharati Mukherjee (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.