It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.

When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.