An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

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.

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