As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take it's first solo walk outside the body.

In his brilliant new book Pankaj Mishra reverses the long gaze of the West upon the East, showing modern history as it has been felt by the majority of the world's population from Turkey to China. These are the amazing stories of the grandfathers of today's angry Asians. Excellent!

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.

...the endless repetition of an ordinary miracle.

Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

I believe strongly in an author's moral responsibility. But his first obligation is to write good books.

My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family.