Despite all the boosterish talk of globalization breaking down barriers, most writers in Anglo-America are still working within the nationalist assumptions of their traditionally powerful societies.

I suppose I've become less judgmental about individuals leading lives according to false ideas and false consciousness, because sometimes entire societies are prey to false ideologies and national delusions.

I feel the responsibility of the novelist is to create a very complex world populated by very complex individuals and to deepen that as much as possible. I don't think the responsibility of the reporter or journalist is fundamentally different.

We are always boosting or trying to prop up the ego by fulfilling some desire or other, and always craving affirmation from the outside.

Today, practically every country outside the West is undergoing an intellectual, political, and cultural churning, from China to Bolivia, Egypt to Indonesia, but we haven't really had, after the 1960s, a major oppositional culture in Western Europe and America. The Occupy movement was so startling and welcome partly because it was the first such eruption of mass protests in decades.

In India, love often follows marriage. I know many people who are still very deeply in love with their wives, who they barely knew before they were married. In America there's this idea that "how could someone get married without being deeply in love with each other?" but in a lot of these cases feelings of love and affection actually grow after they've been legally and formally brought together.

We, especially those of us in depoliticized and pacified societies, need to cast a colder eye at our self-perceptions, now and in the past, as sentinels and embodiments of Enlightenment virtues of reason, dissent, and skepticism.