But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.

When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.

Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.

The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.

When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.