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

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.

I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions the old world is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

But everything of value about me is in my books.