Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.

It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened

I never do anything because I'm a celebrity, as a rule. I do what I do as a citizen.

The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don't own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media.

This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but whenever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people, but they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested? We brought you truth and in our mouth it sounded like a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked.

I do believe that fundamental to any real hope is that we do need to reconstitute what has been generally handed out as the recipe for "happiness" for the human race, and what has generally been decided counts as "progress." People arrive at a different understanding of happiness, however fragile it is. They find it in unexpected ways, in the most unexpected of places.

Just a few years ago India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were one country. Actually, we were many countries if you count the princely states.... Then the British drew a line, and now we're three countries, two of them pointing nukes at each other - the radical Hindu bomb and the radical Muslim bomb.