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.

There's no way of preventing the media from covering attacks as huge events and until the media stops doing that, they will be huge in people's consciousness, and we have to treat these things differently from the smaller random acts of violence.

It's the feeling right from the beginning that the government is not on your side, the government thinks you're going to use this opportunity to cheat them, even though you've just been through this huge trauma.

Despite my critical take on the city, I love Delhi, on the whole - love its monuments, love how easily graspable the city's turbulent history is. The negative things I write about are considered normal here.

I have to admit that I was terrified of ending the book, precisely because I go around saying about pretty much every book I read, "It fell apart at the end." I have friends who are waiting to ridicule me forever.

You can say that a small attack is one in which relatively few people die, but the minute you say that, you can sense the ironies in that statement. A blast in which five people are killed is a meaningful blast.

I'm more interested than Philip Roth in understanding women, even if I do it imperfectly. But that book, Portnoy's Complaint, is literary punk in this way that is rare.