If I were asked to think up a new name for temptation, I should recommend the word 'doorknob', because what are these protuberances put on doors for if not to tempt us.

The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.

People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don't you feel a certain alienation?

When Satan's not in the mood, virtue triumphs. Hasn't even Satan a right not to be in the mood once in a while?

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?

As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.