Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.

That's how they manage to live together, a billion of them, in reasonable peace. They are not perfect, of course. They know how to fight and lie and cheat each other, and all the things that all of us do. But more than any other people in the world, the Indians know how to love one another.

Of course I wanted to know. I was a writer. I wanted to know everything.

Slowly, desolately, the fist of what we'd done unclenched the clawed palm of what we'd become.

The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way.

Because my life has been so notorious and so bad, it can overshadow my work.

It isn't a secret, unless keeping it hurts.