Black money is so much a part of our white economy, a tumour in the centre of the brain - try to remove it and you kill the patient.

...there was another, gorier parturition, when two nations incarnated out of one. A foreigner drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth. And the orchards, fields, factories, businesses, all on the wrong side of that line, vanished with a wave of the pale conjuror's wand.

Children don't make judgments about which details are important... a child captures them all.

There was no such thing as perfect privacy, life was a perpetual concert-hall recital with a captive audience.

In the broad sense, as a processing of everything one hears or witnesses, all fiction is autobiographical - imagination ground through the mill of memory. It's impossible to separate the two ingredients.

Loss is essential. Loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life.

In the end, it’s all a question of balance.