Dullness is a kind of luxury.

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!'

I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money. You know, there was always a couple of bodyguards behind me, who took care if I wanted... I needed pencils for school, I needed a notebook, they were the ones who were taking out the money. I was constantly guarded.

[On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.

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

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

Dullness is a kind of luxury.