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.

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.

America going into this huge, costly, never-ending war created huge debt, which became a huge problem in Congress and led to it stalling many times, putting a halt to different kinds of social progress.

The feeling I got from my research is that the victims of bombings end up becoming as alienated from the government as the terrorists who cause the attacks.

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 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.