The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

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

We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.

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.

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.