Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.

Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.

India is my kid sister.

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.

She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.