You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.

It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

Travel works best when you're forced to come to terms with the place you're in.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books.

Pain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever.

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.