I did subscribe to the freedom movement and I was much closer to the Congress than to the Akali party. It is a communal party.

When you have counted eighty years and more, Time and Fate will batter at your door; But if you should survive to be a hundred, Your life will be death to the very core.

I had lots of time to read [being a lawyer] what I hadn't read in my school and college days. Being a bad student I barely passed my exams and I barely bothered about books. It was sports all the time. I started reading and got involved in literature and writing. The few cases I handled gave me the material for my early short stories.

I use vulgar language in my writing. Or for people I don't like, but I have never had an outburst of anger and I think that's largely [Mahatma] Gandhi's influence. When you lose your temper, you've lost your cause.

If you look at things as they are, there does not seem to be a code either of man or of God on which one can pattern one's conduct. Wrong triumphs over right as much as right over wrong. Sometimes its triumphs are greater. What happens ultimately, you do not know. In such circumstances what can you do but cultivate an utter indifference to all values? Nothing matters. Nothing whatever.

I was never a cardholder. But I was leftist in the sense that I voted communist.

I discovered that a diplomat's life is largely entertaining and meeting people. At the end of the day there's nothing. So I gave up.