The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.

The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over