Top 40 Hari Kunzru Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I can see a version of my life where it all becomes meaningless. On a good day, writing seems noble. Other times, it’s narcissistic and pointless.”

— Hari Kunzru

2. “Suburbia is all about private ownership and not having to share, and it leads to a paranoid, defensive mindset. I know this, having grown up in Essex.”

— Hari Kunzru

3. “I’m interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence – that it’s possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions – is fascinating.”

— Hari Kunzru

4. “Say there are three identical-looking pizza joints on a street. Two of those will always be empty. The third will have a line of people patiently waiting, checking their phones. There’s always one place that’s the place. That’s how it works.”

— Hari Kunzru

5. “Now what I think of when I think of my “self” is the atrocious waste of my years.”

— Hari Kunzru

6. “What if the Reasonable Reaction to the World is Endless Horrified Screaming?”

— Hari Kunzru

7. “Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, believed that sound waves never completely die away, that they persist, fainter and fainter, masked by the day-to-day noise of the world. Marconi thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to ancient times.”

— Hari Kunzru

8. “Nostalgia: from the Greek “nostos” – homecoming – and “algos” pain or ache: the pain a sick person feels because he is not in his native land, or fears never to see it again.”

— Hari Kunzru

9. “As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold.”

— Hari Kunzru

10. “I stand on my public record as a defender of the human rights of Muslims, notably my work for Moazzam Begg and other British Muslims detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay.”

— Hari Kunzru

11. “Distance can create longing. It can open up the gap into which all must fall.”

— Hari Kunzru

12. “When I try to understand somebody, create a character, I fall into them. When I think writers are telling me what to think, I get harrumphy.”

— Hari Kunzru

13. “These days we’re all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out – people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that – and I think we can do more interesting narratives.”

— Hari Kunzru

14. “Plot is the artificial reduction of life’s complexity and randomness. It is a way to give aesthetic form to reality.”

— Hari Kunzru

15. “People want to get back to the source. The old school. They want things they can touch.”

— Hari Kunzru

16. “There was, as she put it, nothing to stop me. So I followed the path of educated misfits through the ages and got a job in a bookshop.”

— Hari Kunzru

17. “I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium.”

— Hari Kunzru

18. “There’s nothing New York likes more than a thing. Or a place. Or a place that’s a thing. Or a thing that happens to be a place.”

— Hari Kunzru

19. “I don’t want you, she said, but it’s the quickest way to end it. Sometimes you’re with a guy and you know you’re the only door he’ll leave through.”

— Hari Kunzru

20. “Electricity is not digital. It does not come in discrete packets, but floods the air and flows through conductors and shoots from the hands of mad scientists in silent movies. If it is futuristic at all, it is a past version of the future, temperamental, unstable, half-alive.”

— Hari Kunzru

21. “I’m fascinated by the emergence of a global class. They’re highly mobile; they reject the idea of place.”

— Hari Kunzru

22. “In my early teens, science fiction and fantasy had an almost-total hold over my imagination. Their outcast status was part of their appeal.”

— Hari Kunzru

23. “There are still some terrible cliches in the presentation of Indian fiction. The lotus flower. The hennaed hands. In mainland Europe, people still slap these images on my books and I go bananas.”

— Hari Kunzru

24. “I suffer from vertigo. It’s paralyzing in extreme situations. The most scared I’ve been as an adult was trying to conquer that fear by going climbing in Wales.”

— Hari Kunzru

25. “There are things about our world that almost by their nature defy our ability to comprehend them. Some people use a religious register to deal with that – they call it God and that’s a way of domesticating it.”

— Hari Kunzru

26. “Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama’s election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening.”

— Hari Kunzru

27. “Alone, we are food for the wolves. That’s how they want us. Isolated. Prey. So we must find each other. We must remember that we do not exist alone.”

— Hari Kunzru

28. “Critchley and Webster’s fierce, witty exploration of Hamlet makes most other writing about Shakespeare seem simpleminded.”

— Hari Kunzru

29. “I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love.”

— Hari Kunzru

30. “Some books I’ve kept because the binding is beautiful – I’m unlikely ever to read my grandmother’s copy of ‘The Life of Lord Nelson.’ I’m addicted to secondhand bookshops.”

— Hari Kunzru

31. “Intellectuals who live in Hungary, or who wish to work or lecture there, are extremely circumspect in their criticism.”

— Hari Kunzru

32. “But it’s the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That’s why I don’t just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven’t been.”

— Hari Kunzru

33. “There is always more to New York. More than you’ve seen or care to see.”

— Hari Kunzru

34. “When you are powerless, something can happen to you and afterwards it has not happened. For you, it happened, but somehow they remember it differently, or don’t remember it at all. You can tell them, but it slips their minds. When you are powerless, everything you do seems in vain. You stow your bag, show your ticket, climb the steps. All the sinners climb aboard.”

— Hari Kunzru

35. “People always look aroused when they’re acting violently.”

— Hari Kunzru

36. “I think it’s important for all culturally literate people to understand the technological substrate of new developments.”

— Hari Kunzru

37. “There’s an explosion of Indian fiction of all kinds, from military thrillers to chicklit. I think that’s exciting.”

— Hari Kunzru

38. “My doctors were fundamentally servants of the status quo. Their work was predicated on the assumption that the world is bearable, and anyone who finds it otherwise should be coaxed or medicated into acceptance. But what if it isn’t? What if the reasonable reaction is endless horrified screaming?”

— Hari Kunzru

39. “Systems, however metaphysical or abstract, are never innocent.”

— Hari Kunzru

40. “Maybe I am one of the last people in history who will feel the things I do. Maybe everything I hoped about the world, and hoped to bring about in it, is doomed to fail. Instead of learning useful things, I have filled my brain with obsolete philosophies, ideas with no more purchase or veracity than the four humors or spontaneous generations. I could say I regret it all, the useless information, but what would be the point? It’s too late now. These are the elements that make me who I am.”

— Hari Kunzru

41. “When you are powerless, something can happen to you and afterwards it has not happened. For you, it happened, but somehow they remember it differently, or don’t remember it at all.”

— Hari Kunzru