The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

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'.

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.

Out of its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink [out of my memory]; the mere thought was painful.

You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.