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

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

My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

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.