She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.

I'm not ambitious. I don't want to get anywhere, I don't want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don't want anything. I don't want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.

As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.

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.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.

It's OK just to be a writer, who writes about the society in which he lives and the issues that most important. Now how can that not be a writer, it always was. It's just recently that writers have been reduced to these playthings of the market.