In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.

Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world 'another Calcutta.'

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.

A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty.

I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, 'By the time you get this, Daddy, I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!'

My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just continuous overload.