Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.

The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch.

The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.

I've never read anything so badly written that got published. It made 'Twilight' look like 'War and Peace.'