I am always amazed when reviewers or some literary critics lump all Asian American writers together as being a homogenous group. Whereas within the s… - Bharati Mukherjee

I have been murdered and reborn at least three times; the very correct young woman I was trained to be, and was very happy being, is very different from the politicized, shrill, civil rights activist I was in Canada, and from the urgent writer that I have become in the last few years in the United States. I can't stop. It's a compulsive act for me. It's a kind of salvation, and the only thing that prevents me from being a Joyce Carol Oates, and I'm not talking about quality, but just that need to create, is schedule.

I am an American. I am an American writer, in the American mainstream, trying to extend it. This is a vitally important statement for me-I am not an Indian writer, not an exile, not an expatriate. I am an immigrant; my investment is in the American reality, not the Indian. I look on ghettoization-whether as a Bengali in India or as a hyphenated Indo-American in North America as a temptation to be surmounted. It took me ten painful years, from the early seventies to the early eighties, to overthrow the smothering tyranny of nostalgia. The remaining struggle for me is to make the American readership, meaning the editorial and publishing industries as well, acknowledge the same fact. (As the reception of such films as Gandhi and A Passage to India as well as The Far Pavillions and The Jewel in the Crown shows, nostalgia is a two-way street. Americans can feel nostalgic for a world they never knew.)

That's the marvelous thing about the writing process: you don't know when and how a memory, a scrap of conversation overheard, an allusion or image, is suddenly going to surface and work itself into your story. (1996)