Everything I've done, I've done because I wanted to do it. In doing it, I've plunged in headlong, always believing in it.

I refuse to indulge in small talk. And compliments, if at all, I save for after the job is done.

I'm not ambitious. Not a bit.

It was the very fact that no one ever imposed anything on me or tried to impose himself on the others.

All my games were political games; I was, like Joan of Arc, perpetually being burned at the stake.

I've always been able to do what I wanted. On the other hand, my mother was. She considered the fact of being a woman a great disadvantage. She had her reasons. In her day women lived in seclusion - in almost all Indian states they couldn't even show themselves on the street.

The doctors advised me not to have even one. My health was still not good, and they said that pregnancy might be fatal. If they hadn't said that to me, maybe I wouldn't have got married. But that diagnosis provoked me, it infuriated me. I answered, 'Why do you think I'm getting married if not to have children? I don't want to hear that I can't have children; I want you to tell me what I have to do in order to have children!'