Literature has become too psychological. We discount the physical, when in fact much of life is physical. People's personalities are partly formed by, or in response to, how they take up space; the physical mask has some relation, howsoever obscure, to the mental work happening underneath.

Of course I had a piece of luck I couldn't have imagine for myself in a million years: I got an agent. That sped up the process. I'd say it's a good idea, getting an agent.

It's rare that you get to read, let alone teach, an arbitrary canon of your choosing in a tight time setting, and I tore through a fairly wide range of Indian writers, some contemporary - like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie - and others older, like R.K. Narayan. And I think what happened at that stage was that I was forced to take a position in my own writing style that was more fixed, as opposed to reading a book at a time and defining myself in opposition to or in awe of it.

I'm pretty private as a person - people generally think they know more about me than they do, because I gregariously advertise what I want known. So it pains me to think people might feel they have an insight into my personal matters, which they most certainly do not.

It's very good for us to say, as liberals, that we should be moved by everything, but the fact is that there's just so much competing for our attention.

I don't think sexual repression leads to violence, but I can see the situation where you're trying very hard to be very religious and to be good but pornography exerts a strong force on you, and one way to get further away from it would be to immerse yourself in a strong religious system.

I don't know what you can do if it's reported that there's been a small attack in the second- or third-largest city in country X that you have no connection to. I don't know what you're supposed to feel or how you're supposed to get into that.