I wrote for many years without showing my writing to anyone, because I was constantly comparing it to what I was reading. You have to compare yourself to the best and feel totally inadequate.

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.

There have been many instances of people combining the political life with the spiritual life, a life of constant self-examination. Gandhi was a great example of that.

The internet has spawned people for whom knowingness is more important than knowledge. It equips you with the illusion of offering knowledge instantly - and quite easily - so you can read a few articles on a few subjects and feel well informed but not actually know any of those subjects in any depth.

The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union - who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn't always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing.

As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.