I think people direct good films when they feel personal to them, not because it's a famous book or something. It has to something move over that and somehow become personal to the director.

If you're on a freeway and want to know if you're being followed, what you do is enormously vary your speed. You accelerate to 100 and slow down to 30 and then accelerate again. In a city, you make a lot of turns against the stream of traffic. You go around a roundabout twice.

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

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.

Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.

I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.