Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.

What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.

Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?

I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they're both amazing ways to understand human nature.

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.