In America, the poor have been invisibilised, because obviously this model of success that has been held out to the world must not show the poor, it must not show the condition of black people. It can only the successful ones, basketball players, musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. But I think the time will come when the Occupy movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.

When I'm outside the cities I do feel optimistic. There is such grandeur in India and so much beauty.

Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.

The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.