States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence - so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only - or well that's excessive - usually, the resistance.

Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.

America is like some crazed, bewildered, rich giant bumbling around in a poor area with his pockets stuffed with money, and lots of weapons - just throwing stuff around.

Because of who I am and what place I have now in India, I'm petitioned all the time to get involved. It's exhausting and very difficult to have to say, 'Look, I'm only one person. I can't do everything.' I know that I don't want to be worn to the bone where I lose my sense of humor.

We must pay close attention to those with another imagination: an imagination outside of capitalism, as well as communism. We will soon have to admit that those people, like the millions of indigenous people fighting to prevent the takeover of their lands and the destruction of their environment - the people who still know the secrets of sustainable living - are not relics of the past, but the guides to our future.

There is nothing that pleases me more than a beautiful sentence ... It is something that satisfies me.

Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn't be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn't be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; these are political views which most of us hold anyway.